I’m traveling in India these days, which means that I’m enjoying a lovely respite from going to church. There’s no denying it. At least, denying it would only be another act of inauthenticity by which many of us church-goers live. Church is largely a chore, aggravating and exhausting, which I undertake once a week because I have received from my parents a religious tradition, elements of which I have come to own for myself, as parts of myself, and dear... Read more
We bought our first home, here in Memphis, more than a decade ago, and we celebrated home ownership by handing our kids a big bucket of sidewalk chalk, representing all the pastel colors of the rainbow. Knock yourselves out, Kids, we said, now there’s no landlord to say ‘no’. And we left them to their own devices and the driveway. A couple hours later, they called us from the house to see their handiwork. Beaming with pride, they led us to... Read more
One of the things that keeps Mormonism from being Christian is its dogmatic attachment to god’s embodiment. While the Christian world insists on god’s transcendence—that is, that god is immaterial—Mormonism clings to a scriptural declaration that god is embodied. “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also”, goes the prophetic word.* I like god’s embodiment. The notion that god is in creation with us appeals to me, though I’m well aware of... Read more
Archimedes is reported to have said, lo, these more-than-two-millennia ago, that if he were given a sufficiently long lever, he, personally, could move the earth. Now, according to some enterprising internet wonks, it turns out that Archimedes’ lever would have to be something like ten million light years long if his fulcrum was set one meter in from where the lever contacted the earth. That length will vary as we adjust some of the assumptions we have to make, but, in... Read more
Word has come from none other than Robert Gates that the Boy Scouts of America will have to end its openly discriminatory policy of not allowing gay adults to serve as Boy Scout leaders. What I find so delicious about the BSA’s supreme leader’s opinion is the position of chagrin and shame into which it has put so many low-level minions who have treated advocates of change in this matter like so much dog droppings. Go treat Robert Gates—former CIA... Read more
We finally have empirical evidence that Jesus knew everything. The son of god, of course, said, “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” Now we have sociological data supporting the contention that people who are more self-less are more charitable. Only, the idea of self-less-ness that produces this data may not be the same thing as traditional Christian selflessness. Daniel M. Bartels, Trevor Kvaren, and Shaun Nichols,... Read more
The Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, or RFRA’s, that the states are adopting, pell-mell, have the right idea, and I want in. A RFRA is a vital piece of state-level legislation that strengthens the constitutional protection of religious exercise, because the constitutional protection of religion has become an eighteenth-century coot, grown so toothless and old that these days it spends most of its time staring out the window at the begonias and muttering about the old mare, and just can’t forbid... Read more
Anyone—Mormon or otherwise—who has sat through any LDS Mormon church services conducted in English has had to endure the sound of LDS Mormons wrestling, mostly unsuccessfully, with archaic English pronouns. Wandering into the array of obsolete pronouns including thee, thou, thy, and thine, most English-speaking LDS Mormons are unable to distinguish between possessive, plural, nominative, and objective cases, but feel an obligation to try, anyway.* The consequence is a mish-mash of pseudo-Elizabethan colloquialisms that only makes one wonder why LDS Mormons don’t throw ye into the mix,... Read more
I do my exercises faithfully. Not only because I had back surgery fifteen years ago, nor even only to address the labral tear in my hip. Easter comes in the Spring, and Easter means three hours of standing. For a person in my frail physical condition, three hours of standing can be excruciating. But I wouldn’t miss it. Hence, the exercises. Around ten in the p.m. on April 11, I’ll drop two Alleve and wander over to St. John... Read more
In the mid-eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, figured out what mammals are: hairy, warm-blooded, live-born, mammary-feeders (hence, the term mammals). At this point, Europeans breathed a collective sigh of relief that they could be certain to know a mammal when they saw one. Linnaeus’s taxonomy was the perfect Enlightenment project. Having pulled down the idol church of the medieval ages and following on the Renaissance’s careful measurement of humanity’s fitness for the niche, the Enlightenment charged towards the... Read more
Aestheism
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In