Submissions

Unreasonable Faith accepts well-written essays, book reviews, lists, and interviews relating to religion, science and/or skepticism.

How to Submit: Email your post to unreasonablefaith [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject “Post Submission” in Word or HTML format. Include a one-sentence byline and a link to your blog (if applicable). Posts will be edited for clarity and grammar.

Traffic: Unreasonable Faith gets hundreds of thousands of views each month and has over 2,200 daily feed subscribers.

To increase your chances of acceptance, please review and follow this style guide:

General Principles

  • Short. Under 700 words, unless it’s very interesting. Omit needless words and thoughts.
  • Scannable. Do this by (1) keeping sentences & paragraphs short, (2) using bullets & numbers (3) using blockquotes and (4) adding headers to longer posts.
  • Clear. Clear writing comes from clear thinking. Get your points and thoughts in order before you start fleshing it out with prose. Avoid obscure words.
  • Interesting. Nobody wants to read something that’s boring. Be specific. Use stories, anecdotes, wit, humor, and comparisons.
  • Rewritten. Don’t knock something off and send it in. Simplify, clarify, rephrase boring sentences, and use rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration.
  • Professional. Check your spelling. Read it aloud to catch grammar mistakes and awkward phrasing.

Book Reviews

  • Include summary of the book, a critique, and a concluding thought.
  • A couple quotes from the book can be helpful to get an idea of the author’s style.
  • Consider ending with something thought-provoking or a question for people to discuss.

Resources

The best book on writing is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. After that, I recommend Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.

5 Responses to Submissions

  1. Caleb says:

    First, your contact form is broken and forums are down, so I’m using this.

    Second, please bring back the full RSS feeds. The extremely abbreviated ones make it impractical to read on the go as the content isn’t pre-downloaded in my RSS reader and the net connection is too slow for me to cope :/

    Third, tell your system I’m not posting comment-s- too quickly, please.

    • Custador says:

      Dan is working on the forums and contact form being down. It’s due to the migration to Patheos and will take some time to sort.
      I’m not sure what we can do about RSS feeds as (I think) they’re handled by the host.
      Finally, we’ve been on the receiving end of a barrage of spam. There are 500 extra comments in the filter from the last hour alone – So even if we could alter that setting I’d advise Dan not to do it.

  2. Caleb says:

    Good to know.

    I hope the RSS feed can be changed.

    I wouldn’t want you to remove the comment flooding setting either, but it’s broken. The first comment I tried to post said I’d posted too quickly. Another result of the migration, I’m sure.

    Thanks for the response.

  3. korbendallas says:

    To Lorette C. Luzajic

    Your article on Rushdoony(google his name and second thing that comes up) is a disgraceful distortion of his beliefs and teachings. If you had any sense of honesty or integrity you would take that article down. There are so many untruths and misrepresentations there I don’t even know where to begin. I will address a few of them.

    1. Rushdoony is NOT a Jew hater. Anyone who has listened to or read any of his stuff would know that Rushdoony has a extreme respect and high regard for Jewish people. He often praises Jewish culture and history in his work, not to mention one of his closest colleagues, Sam Blumenfeld, was a Jewish convert to Christianity. Rushdoony did NOT deny the holocaust! I did hear him say once that he thought the numbers were an exaggeration. He was vehemently Anti-Statist and Anti-Nazi. He was a historian, sometimes historians disagree on historical facts. That is quite different than denying the Holocaust!

    2. Rushdoony was definitely NOT a racist. He believed in the inequality of cultures, not of races. He viewed European culture as superior to many cultures, ONLY because of the long Christian influence on European history. He points out that the Anglo-Saxons were backward savages and cannibals before their conversion to Christianity. He believed that all races and nations and peoples would eventually reach their full potential in Christ. In addition to that he believed black progress had been hindered and even retrograded by idiotic and senseless state subsidies, such as welfare.

    3. Finally, Rushdoony did believe in the full implementation of Biblical law, including stoning. However, he recognized this as only practical when a group of people living in a community together agreed to be governed by biblical law, not unlike the Puritans. He was somewhat of a libertarian and believed the rule of civil government should function primarily at the county level. That way people in each county could govern themselves the way they saw fit, leaving open great potential for philosophical and religious freedom.

    I think that people make up lies about Rushdoony because they are afraid of his ideas. He is unyielding in his logic and really a true genius. He makes short work of the philosophers that are foundational thinkers for our modern humanistic society, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Freud, Marqui De Sade, Kant, Nietzsche, Darwin. People are uncomfortable with him because he challenges their worldview, therefore people try to bury him as deep as they can.

    There are two possibilities.

    1. You have never truly attempted to understand his worldview and have only carelessly read his work.

    2. You have thoroughly understood his works and they threaten you. You don’t believe in objective morality therefore you have no reservations about making up vicious lies about a person and then presenting them as truth.

    Either way you should do the decent and civil thing and take that piece of garbage down!

  4. FRED YURMAN says:

    Almost since the very beginning of human awareness, there has been an increasing effort to discover why the universe was conceived, and the true purpose for all the living creatures that have been born in the process.
    Although we may never know the truth concerning why our world came into being or what forces were responsible for deliberately creating it, many individuals have determined that we cannot accept the fanciful explanations contrived in an age of total ignorance, meant to explain the absolute meaning of our lives.
    No Faith Required deals with the realities of life in a clear and realistic manner – no wishful thinking, no unrealistic fantasies, just plain rational common sense.
    The main character, Barney Fenner, through an extraordinary encounter, is made aware of the hidden forces that induce living creatures to overcome their environmental life-threatening confrontations. He learns to recognize a combination of evolutionary progressions which permitted life on Earth to reach its present stage of development.
    Barney adamantly defends his faith in a Supreme Creator. He firmly believed that the Creator controls everything and everyone in his Universe.
    After many deeply probing discussions, Barney finally accepts the existence of natural forces that move all living creatures on a definite trajectory without the existence or assistance of Divine guidance.
    The informative discussions may help agnostic and atheist readers to find logical answers to many nagging questions that may plague them.
    No Faith Required does not denigrate or demean those who maintain a strong faith in a particular point of view concerning the nature of our world.
    If you have been struggling with the relevance of your inherited faith – if your life has been filled with fear and guilt rather than pride and confidence, No Faith Required is an exciting, thought-provoking reading experience

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