If a novelist wrote this as a plot point in a piece of fiction, his editor would say it was too on-the-nose. A Christian cathedral that has stood for a millennium at the center of a city known as the “City of Light” is devastated by fire during Holy Week. Also, the country where this … Read more
“First thing’s first, I’m the realest.”
— Early 21st century poet and philosopher Iggy Azalea
A while back, I was having a discussion with my spiritual adviser and brother-in-law Jeremy about the similarities between the Christian church and Apple Computers.
Here are a few videos to get 2016 rolling in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way. First up is William F. Buckley and Malcom Muggeridge discussing faith and doubt: Next, the Stand to Reason blog asks the question that nags at all believers from time to time, “How do I know if that inner voice is God speaking … Read more
Above is a scene from the (great) movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, where the demanding chess tutor is teaching the chess prodigy wunderkind how to see the board. The actual, concrete position of the pieces keeps the boy from engaging his creative vision to see where they could be. He needs the pieces to be more abstract, … Read more
We’re constantly told that science and religion are like Kanye West and Taylor Swift — arch enemies incapable of coexistence, two Venn diagram circles that don’t overlap at any point. Well, dear reader, I know smart, cosmopolitan people like you and me don’t believe that. But how did that misconception become part of conventional wisdom? Who … Read more
I mean space aliens. The E.T. kind. When I saw the title of this post on io9.com — “How Would Christianity Deal with Extraterrestrial Life?” — I expected it to be some kind of smarmy parody of how those ignorant Bible-thumpers would respond to a visit from Mr. Spock (“Get off’n my property, ya pointy-eared demon!” … Read more
Michael Hanby uses some very long words and very deep thinking to advise on “what to do when you are on the wrong side of history.” I recommend reading the whole thing (and if you’re like me, maybe reading it two or three times before you get it). But if you don’t have time, here’s … Read more
Connor Wood at the Science on Religion blog thinks that yes, yes they are: To put it simply, the mind’s causal stories tend to assume that whatever has happened in the past will determine what happens in the future. In the crisp realm of Newtonian physics, this is generally a good assumption. But in the … Read more
The scene: Adam Gopnik writes an article for The New Yorker condescendingly describing the decline of religion in the West. (I’m not including a quote, because it’s nothing you haven’t heard a thousand times before. The only difference is that it’s in The New Yorker and therefore longer than most such articles and in close … Read more
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has some interesting comments on mistakes that religious types make when they let their pronouncements wander into the field of economics: Now, it’s fine to make non-scientific claims when you are not making science. But when we mistake science for theology—and vice versa—we make mistakes. When some clerics disputed the heliocentric model of … Read more
As it should. Raising questions is one of the main jobs of science, after all. But some of those questions are addressed straight on, and others are danced around harder than a boom box in either Breakin’ or Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. GetReligion highlights some of the latter kind of questions in the coverage of … Read more
David French has some observations about the hesitance of Christians to explicitly discuss faith in debates with non-believers: One has to swim in Evangelical waters to understand how completely we’ve accepted the veracity of the bad faith critiques from the secular Left. We run around wringing our hands, saying things like “we’ve got to make sure … Read more
There was a time when religious freedom was a big deal to Americans. It used to be at least a consideration. I mean, it is in the Constitution and all. People have asked for all kinds of things — psychedelic mushrooms, exclusion from the draft, not to get blood transfusions when they’re bleeding to death … Read more
Connor Wood has a compelling post on the history, and the future, of the ongoing slap-fight between science and religion. There are a lot of quotable parts, so I’m going to quote a lot: since the 19th century, the religion-science divide has been encouraged by the popularizers of Science for the sake of their profession. What … Read more
As someone who doesn’t really get into the churchy worship experience, this post from Donald Miller really speaks to me: …I experience an intimacy with God I consider strong and healthy. It’s just that I don’t experience that intimacy in a traditional worship service. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of … Read more
On Super Bowl Sunday, sports and religion intersect like no other day in American life (possible exceptions: anytime Notre Dame and BYU play each other in anything; Joel Osteen’s church-wide foosball tournament). Walter Russell Mead shares the stats and adds a dose of good sense: According toa recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), … Read more
Most people live like they believe there are two worlds — a physical world and a spiritual world. The physical world is the one they see themselves in 99% of the time, while they only worry about the spiritual one during particularly exciting Sundays and on Halloween. These two worlds have no overlap, and they … Read more
What’s the relationship between atheism and wealth? Do societies become wealthy because they reject religion? Or do they reject religion because they think they can afford to? …namely, there’s good evidence that atheism and secularism are much more costly, in terms of sheer energy expenditure, than religious ways of organizing society. As I said, this may … Read more
Dave Ramsey, as Dave Ramsey does, recently published on his website a post that calls attention to the fact that people who are rich tend to share similar behavior patterns, and people who are poor tend to share similar behavior patterns. For instance: 70% of wealthy eat less than 300 junk food calories per day. … Read more
Be careful with what you read in the mainstream media about the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court. You can bet that they’ll give short shrift to the religious issues involved. Luckily, sites like GetReligion help to lengthen the shrift. Here they provide some much-needed clarification to the folks a the NY Times: The … Read more