Being in Uncertainty
Claire Creffield, an atheist who finds that, sometimes, “invoking the concept of God seems a very compelling way indeed of doing justice to the strangeness, the beauty and the peril of our lives,” asks...
Tagged: Religion
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,...
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...
Paul Ryan and the Catholic Vote
Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches worries that Romney’s pick of former Ayn Rand superfan Paul Ryan will “ignite a religious war of words”: Although House Republicans of course were not eager to advertise this,...
I’m a Bad American
I make it point to assume initially that Mitt Romney doesn’t believe the words that come out of his mouth, but the convictions he expressed in his VFW foreign policy speech may be just...
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...
On Being a Critical, Suspicious Son of the Church
Much to Tom Van Dyke’s seemingly apparent confusion, I take a harshly critical stance toward the mitre-wearing powers that be who run the Roman Catholic Church, the institutional faith to which I belong. As...
Vote Well or Go to Hell
I don’t have a TV and I seldom listen to the radio, so I’m spared the unseemly barrage of political advertisements that most Americans must suffer. Alas, I cannot evade all the campaign season’s...
A Rational, Religious Mind
Alex Knapp summarizes the reason why many Christians reject the science of evolution: For some Christians, evolution would, if true, completely shatter the doctrine of Original Sin. After all, if humans evolved, then there...
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,...
