Visiting Heaven
Eban Alexander has journeyed to heaven and returned to tell the tale. In addition to writing an upcoming book, he chose to publish his private revelation in the pages of Newsweek. He’s a neurosurgeon,...
Tagged: Hermeneutics
Human Sexuality and Religious Norms
Decades after the sexual revolution, many religious conservatives remain fiercely committed to preaching, if not always living, an absolute and absolutist understanding of human sexuality. Mainstream biologists, psychologists and sociologists, building on the science...
When Truth Serves Power
I see two reasons for being suspicious of truth claims made by authorities, be the authorities religious, political, or otherwise: first, a particular claim may not be true, and second, even if a claim...
Echoes on the Road
“What seems to me to be constitutive of the religious is, therefore, the fact of crediting a word, in accordance with a certain code and within the limits of a certain canon. I would...
The Assurances of Infallibility
Show me an alleged divinely-revealed truth, and I will show you the operations of religious authority, for there can be no transmission of such truth-claims without some degree of power. Not every religious authority,...
Philosophy as a Culture War
The other day, philosopher Santiago Zabala chose to honor the late Hans-Georg Gadamer by rallying his troops in the philosophy world’s version of the culture war: In this decade since Gadamer’s death, hermeneutics has...
Defining Faith between Theism and Atheism
Eying a discussion hosted by atheist blogger Leah Libresco on whether both theists and atheists can have faith of the same sort, my friend Darwin throws his papist hat into ring, rightly noting that...
Bidding Farewell to the Law of Human Nature
The day before his papacy began, Joseph Ratzinger delivered a homily in which he made the oft-quoted observation: “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose...
Santorum, Obama, and Theological Politics
There’s always a danger of reading too much into a vague statement some politician makes, especially when the statement is presented without context, so I want to tread carefully when examining the following quote...
In Defense of Art Pluralism
Tod Kelly makes elitist art snobbery look good. I’m something of a snob myself when it comes to the arts, and so it should come as no surprise that I agree with his case...
