Category: Posts
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The Benefits of Conflict
The Economist has already shown its interest in following the fascinating recent scientific work about the origins and functions of human religiosity. This week’s article on the subject, “Praying for Health,” brings up challenging questions both for the study of religion and for the study of conflict. […]
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Can Creationism Go on Forever?
AlterNet has just posted a review I did of Lauri Lebo’s The Devil in Dover, an account of the 2005 evolution trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. It was a real treat to do the article, since I wrote my college thesis on the Dover trial while it was going on. As another round of my usual…
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Clarify Your Position
This passage from Henry Miller’s late book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, has long spoken to me. I first found it when I was eighteen, the summer of a month-long solo road trip across the United States and back, the climax of which was the discovery of Big Sur. Those were my…
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Plato against Impiety
It is always a wonderful sensation when one discovers something in an ancient text that feels fresh and alive and of the present. That was my experience today in reading book X of Plato’s Laws, his conservative, unfinished final work. There is always this problem in doing historical work: what in our minds today was…
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Cicero’s Sin
I guess Cicero was the original flip-flopper. Since following him in a recent boat of watching the HBO/BBC TV series, Rome, I’ve been reading up on the guy who before I’ve mainly known from heresay—from the pens of Augustine, Montaigne, etc. It was disappointing to see that the show had no interest in Cicero’s (or…
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The Certainties of Ascension
At the Church of the Ascension in Manhattan, two things can be counted on in every service (the English ones, at least): words of welcome will be made with explicit mention of sexual orientation and Sibelius’s “Finlandia” will be sung, using the words by Lloyd Stone: This is my song, O God of all the…
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Dialogs and Debates
Thanks to Tom Gilson’s critique, I have already pulled back somewhat on things I said in my article this week at Religion Dispatches. And since it is a dogma of mine that there is truth in even falsehoods, I’d like to try teasing out what put me on a seemingly unwarranted attack. It all reminds…
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Still Not Dead Yet, for Now, at Least
The last couple of days I’ve been working on a response to “God Is Not Dead Yet,” the current cover article of Christianity Today. Since I’m working on a project about proofs for the existence of God, I couldn’t help but want to tackle this meaty piece by the prominent evangelical apologist William Lane Craig.…
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A Questioning Teenager
For the last few months I’ve been playing around with this article for a popular (and rather self-helpy) religion website. The editor has stopped returning my messages, so I figure the deal is dead (this happens sometimes). So I sez to myself, why not share it with my Row Boat friends? It is more of…
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Nonviolent Technology in Tehran
The last few days have borne troubling omens for the future. The American and Israeli militaries have been conducting exercises that look a whole lot like strikes against Iran, and in response, Iran launched some of its old rockets in a show of force. (When one of them malfunctioned, the Iranians doctored the official photos,…