Where Religion Begins
If I were asked today why I am religious, I would have to begin somewhere, and I would begin where religion begins. Religion begins (and ends) with love. By love I mean the unconditional,...
Author: Kyle Cupp
Echoes on the Road
“There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is...
Observation
Blogging becomes extraordinarily difficult when done in the presence of an 11-month-old who’s eager for your attention and not at all shy about letting you know.
Pacifism: Its Moral Value and Insufficiency
As an action aimed at social betterment, pacifism–the refusal to return violence with violence–almost always fails miserably. In his essay “Non-violent Man and History,” philosopher Paul Ricoeur, himself a pacifist, shined a light on...
State, Violence, and Global Order
Over on the front page, Tim Kowal offers a considered meta-observation of how American power functions in the world: True, America wields a big stick in the world. But it wields it clumsily, taking...
Let’s Go for a Stroll
The Care Bears as virtue ethicists? Brandon Watson goes there. He’s been on a roll lately, exposing the uselessness of Eric Holder’s ethical support for assassinations, explaining why ethics is public, and, of course,...
A Clarification on Unethical Religiosity
Seems my foray into biblical mythology distracted from my larger objective, which was to draw attention to the paradoxical conflict that can arise between being religious and being ethical–or, to put the conflict in...
When Being Religious Means Being Unethical
This past weekend I listened to the tale from Genesis in which God tests the obedience of Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It’s easy to brush aside the troubling ethical...
Revelations of Art
Art expresses truth in the same fundamental way as religious ritual and myth do: its truth is the truth of disclosure. Rather than capturing a reality we can weigh and measure or test with...
