The question to ask proponents of intelligent design is this: At what point the police should stop investigating an unsolved murder and close the case, declaring that God must have simply wanted the victim dead? It is the same point at which it is appropriate to tell scientists to stop looking for explanations and simply conclude “God did it”.Intelligent design isn’t just bad news for science. As an overarching approach to evidence and investigative reasoning, it can have a detrimental... Read more

“A donkey turning a millstone did a hundred miles walking. When it was loosed, it found that it was still at the same place. There are men who make many journeys, but make no progress towards any destination” (The Gospel of Philip 56). Read more

I didn’t watch much of the ‘enhanced’ version of “The Constant” (last week’s episode), but I did catch a glimpse of one important point: the name of the military base where Desmond was stationed is a real place north of the Arctic Circle, and it appears in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy as a gateway to parallel universes. Did anyone else notice that, at the end, Desmond is in both times simultaneously? That is what becomes possible when one... Read more

I’ve long wanted to paraphrase the slogan from Composers Datebook to apply it to another interest of mine: “Reminding you that all religions were once new” The original phrase is applied to music, and the point is that all the music we label “classical” today was once simply “music”. Classical is what has stood the test of time, but just because it is old, or because it has remained popular, doesn’t automatically mean it is ‘better’. Indeed, it doesn’t seem... Read more

Charles Allen shared this with me, and presumably those who would appreciate it, and those who read this blog, are overlapping circles. Let us pray… The Lord’s Prayer of the Lingering Tillichian Ground of Being, No object among other objects,Aahhh.Be.In history as well as beyond history.Support our finite freedom,And sustain us when our dreaming innocenceBecomes Zeitgebund.For with you aloneAre autonomyAnd heteronomyEternally theonomous. The same prayer and others can also be found here. Read more

When a North American reads the description of the cultural values of the Greco-Roman social world into which Christianity was born, they get the sense that they are dealing with a world closer to The Sopranos than the ideals that the United States, for instance, tends to view favorably. The analogy is appropriate, since the Italian Mafia’s values certainly do derive from the Mediterranean world and from a culture whose traditional values are closer to those of the New Testament... Read more

Questions Unlimited (a campus organization I am involved in) hosted a lunchtime discussion entitled “More Than One Way to Look at God?: Why the God Who’s Not There Might Not Be God”. I was one of the panelists; another was Rev. Charles Allen, who has a website with interesting pieces he has written on various topics. It would be hard to summarize, but there is much I agree with in the piece by John Hick that I quoted in my... Read more

“Applying a kind of philosophical Golden Rule, it would be unreasonable not to grant to religious experience within other traditions what I affirm of it within my own tradition” (John Hick, “Who or What is God?” p.6). Read more

Review of Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Great Stem of Souls (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2005). 388 + xv pp. Reviewed by Dr. James F. McGrath, Associate Professor of Religion, Butler University, Indianapolis, USA. Buckley’s book The Great Stem of Souls derives its title from a phrase used to designate the Mandaean community. It is found in the colophons of Mandaean manuscripts, which not only list the scribes who copied the manuscript, but at times also refer to contemporary events and... Read more

One thing we learned on the most recent episode of LOST (“The Constant”) is that Desmond was not simply recollecting his past in a vivid hallucination, nor simply seeing the future, but going to the past and future (or, at least, his consciousness was doing so. It was stated at one point in the episode is that the future cannot be changed. This seems, in terms of the show’s outlook, to be both true and untrue. Desmond managed to make... Read more