Tag: skepticism
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‘This Isn’t, Thank God, Another Book about the Proofs for God’s Existence’
The filter blog Arts & Letters Daily is great, and it’s even greater that today it featured Robert Bolger’s excellent Los Angeles Review of Books review of God in Proof. Writes Bolger: Schneider tips his hand a bit with the title God in Proof. This isn’t, thank God, another book about the proofs for God’s…
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A Holiday from Politics?
I’m a little perplexed by the new review of Thank You, Anarchy by Adam Kirsch, an editor of The New Republic among other things. Short of outright disapproving of my book, he replays a common liberal dismissal of Occupy. “For the vast majority of Americans, it was little more than a news story,” he begins,…
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The Suspicious Revolution
What does it do to people, and to a society, to suddenly become revolutionary? I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent…
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What’s at Stake in The Tree of Life?
If you’re into getting worked up about semi-artsy movies, the one you’re supposed to get worked up about lately is Terrence Malick’s new The Tree of Life. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. And got booed. You’re especially supposed to get worked up, it seems, if you’re into religion. At Killing the…
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Oprah-atic Citizenship
I’m really excited to announce that my interview with Kathryn Lofton, one of the most creative and brilliant young scholars of religion around right now, is now up at The Immanent Frame. Katie is a historian by trade, but over the years she has also cultivated a powerful fascination with Oprah, leading to her new…
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What Good Are Good Arguments?
Do good arguments end up carrying the day? If not, what else is at play? Today at The Immanent Frame, I interview Colin Jager, professor of English at Rutgers and an authority on natural theology in British romanticism. He’s the author of, literally, The Book of God. Our conversation touches on many things swirling through…
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Karen Armstrong’s Compassion
It’s a common refrain that one hears among those of us looking to think responsibly about the world’s religions: at bottom, they all have a common core, and the core is a genuinely good one. That would be nice, but I’ve never really bought it. To be honest, I don’t even think it would be…
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Events Today in Costa Rica
My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our…
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Niebuhr, Pacifism, Realism, Peacebuilding
During the years leading up to World War II, there was no deeper thorn in the side of Christian pacifists—by whom I mainly mean members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a community founded in the first months of the previous world war—than Reinhold Niebuhr. Having been formed as a pastor in working-class neighborhoods of Detroit,…
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An Experiment in Faith
More on nonviolence. I hope this isn’t dull to some of you. To me it is an important conversation to have in anticipation of the new administration entering office, when any radical hope feels, for the moment, more thinkable than usual, more possible. In several recent articles and posts relating to nonviolence (here, here, and…