Theme: Religion

No, she insisted, she could never go back to Zanesville. Of course, she would continue to visit her hometown but she would not live there again. My student’s words were adamant but her voice broke with undisguised sadness. I stared at her as the sun flooded the oak desk behind me. Leaning against my chair, I repeated mentally her declaration, one that I had often heard before and had in fact uttered myself years earlier. Read more

The narrative of splits in Protestantism which is based on convenient binaries, with African and Asian churches emerging as the conservatives, and the US and Europe as the liberals, fails to capture the complexity of what is going on at ground level.Read more

It was jarring to realize it, but there it was: I nearly wished evil on someone. Alan Sullivan’s cancer was starting to close in on him, and I should have been sobered. But what I felt was startlingly close to Schadenfreude. Admittedly, I was lurking on the outskirts of this situation.Read more

I have declined, and continue to decline, to reply to many of the diverse points of criticism directed against my profession of faith, which I released into the world a month or so ago. I had thought it would be clear that there is a sort of writing that does not invite arguments in opposition, but simply says lo! behold! ecce!, and carries with it an implied Whitmanian ass-covering: "You say I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself!"Read more

Judith Butler discusses the gathering of crowds.Read more

Different people, different closets. I don't quite know how to say it delicately so I'm just going to come right out and say it. I believe in God. Apart from periodic spells of foolish pride, I have believed in God all my life. Even during these spells, I did not so much cease to believe, as turn my back on what I believed.Read more

Declaring oneself an "atheist" just isn’t what it used to be. Growing numbers of Generation Y prefer to remain agnostic, which is why so many of them go by the "nones", or state no religious preference. My wife used to work at a large university, and she told me that on standardized tests, many of the students put "human" in the ethnic and racial identity box.Read more

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I don’t know about the time of Marx’s original publications, but I’d like to believe that in the 1890s perhaps, 1920s, when there was a strong labor movement going on in the country, a lot of civil unrest, my sense of things is that it was possible to describe oneself as a Marxist, to use Marxist ideas, to appropriate Marxist categories and language, to use the ideas of socialism in a fairly overt and mainstream way for the purpose of social organization.Read more

It occurred to me that Genesis is such a supreme fiction, or perhaps it is the supreme fiction in western culture, which begat many others. For thousands of years this book has been the mirror or lamp that reveals what reality consists of – regarding the nature of human existence, the cosmos, and God. Or, to put it differently, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.Read more

One honest response to the lunacy of the world is to laugh. Laughter relieves anxiety and fear, and it pokes holes in the pretensions of the powerful. In medieval times, humor was often coarse and obscene, and the more effective because of it. Luther’s rough handling of his opponents is rooted in this medieval tradition. During the heyday of the Reformation, with social upheaval, religious conflict, and the devil on the loose, François Rabelais wrote the first volume of his comic novel, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Read more

It may be ironic, but it is not entirely surprising that the YouTube clip of what appears to be a badly made film satirizing the Prophet Muhammad appeared, causing mayhem and destruction—coinciding with the death of US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens—in the same week of September that the novelist Salman Rushdie published Joseph Anton.Read more

One of the more frequent comments made – approvingly or disapprovingly – about my recent biography of that international superstar of Baroque Europe, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, concerns its scandalous content. Why so much scandal, some of it quite shocking, about Bernini, his family, his patrons, and in general, the Rome of his lifetime?Read more

Like many other Kantian-inspired accounts, the one Arnold offers as an alternative to cognitivism is initially quite compelling, but when carefully and closely examined, bafflingly obscure. One rather basic question unanswered in Arnold's presentation is: could there be a being that was physically a duplicate of a normal human, but was lacking in spontaneity? Read more

Darwin chose agnostic for tactical reasons. He said the common man was not ready for atheism. There’s a lovely story the comedian Julia Sweeney tells about her own journey from devout Catholicism to atheism. After she’d finally decided she was an atheist, something appeared about it in the newspaper. Her mother phoned her in hysterics and said something like “I don’t mind you not believing in God, but an atheist?” Read more

I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds.Read more

In the town of Surat, in India, was a coffee-house where many travellers and foreigners from all parts of the world met and conversed. One day a learned Persian theologian visited this coffee-house. He was a man who had spent his life studying the nature of the Deity, and reading and writing books upon the subject. He had thought, read, and written so much about God, that eventually he lost his wits, became quite confused, and ceased even to believe in the existence of a God. The Shah, hearing of this, had banished him from Persia.Read more

Twelve hundred years after Ambrose’s encomium to Bologna’s convent singers, at a time when nuns’ music more regularly offered cause for comment, clerical reaction to it had taken quite a negative turn. Had don Ercole lived another thirty years, he might have expired from a paroxysm of schadenfreude masking as indignation in the face of the unparalleled warfare at Bologna’s most musically illustrious convent. How might he have pled for a ban on convent music had he witnessed the following scene?Read more

In a speech at the London School of Economics, Abdulkarim Soroush discusses the role of philosophy, and Karl Popper's thought in particular, in Iranian religious and political reform.Read more

Sandy Stodermeyer was sitting at the kitchen table scanning her Fellowship cookbook for a mushroom soup casserole when Troy came home from school and announced that he’d be having a Jewish Sabbath for supper. Sandy looked up, confused. Read more