A Sin Unlike Any Other

September 2, 2024 By James F. McGrath

Are Christian same-sex relationships an oxymoron? Or is claiming that God prohibits love – not lust but love – what is really strange in the current discussions? If you follow the early reviews of New Testament scholar Richard Hays’ new book The Widening of God’s Mercy, written with his son Christopher, they are a very revealing exercise in missing the point. The complaints from conservatives consistently focus on Hays and Hays not making the argument through exegesis. In other words, in... Read more

Star Trek Discovery Finale: Progenitors All The Way Down

August 31, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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You probably remember how, during the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, the news circulated that characters were not even allowed to say “God” on the show. That this turned out not to be the case as a rule was appropriate, since the second pilot of TOS witnessed Capt. Kirk pontificating about the attributes of a deity. With that as the starting point, it is perhaps especially fitting that the final season of Discovery has had a spiritual focus. The... Read more

Political False Prophets

August 24, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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Deuteronomy 18 has this to say about false prophets: 20 But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’ 21 And if you say in your heart, ‘How shall we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’— 22 when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the... Read more

Studying Religion Today

August 19, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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As of June 1st I am chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Butler University. Like all Humanities subjects, the study of religion has witnessed a significant decline as students gravitate to the majors in STEM fields that they imagine will guarantee them jobs and high salaries. All this is happening simultaneous with the major sectors of industry emphasizing the need for Humanities skills in the current context. As the World Economic Forum published a few years... Read more

The Party of Biblical Values

August 13, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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Vote for the party of biblical values! Have you been told that? I was recently (and not for the first time) by someone who was clearly aligned completely with the Republican party. The individual also claims to be a Christian. When I pushed back on their stance, they assumed that I’m a Democrat. The starting point for any discussion of U.S. politics as it relates to faith ought to be that no major party is likely to completely represent biblical... Read more

On Being a Leftist in the United States

August 9, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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As a Leftist in the United States, it seems appropriate to disclose the Leftist agenda among Leftists in the United States. The Leftist Agenda Revealed At the top of the list is to get people to recognize that the Democratic Party is not “Leftist.” It may be to the left of the Republican party, but that’s precisely the point. Liberal and conservative, right and left, are terms of comparison. They don’t designate absolute stances. Whether educational institutions like Wheaton... Read more

On Trump as Weird

August 7, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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Now that Tim Walz is the pick to be Kamala Harris’ running mate, the label “weird” is going to be getting even more attention. He is the one whose reference to Donald Trump as weird got so much attention and sparked the current movement. I have seen a lot of mixed reactions, as well as some amusing memes, related to the topic of Donald Trump as “weird.” Most of the negative reaction has come from people like me, the nerds,... Read more

What If Imane Khelif Was Your Daughter?

August 2, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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Imane Khelif has become the center of a lot of news reporting, but not because of her Olympic victory. That someone got hurt during a boxing match should be no surprise and isn’t news. What should surprise us and cause us all to reflect is when random people think they can decide whether someone they do not know is a man or a woman. On the right is a photo of the woman is at the center of this. It... Read more

Why “Life Begins at Conception” Is Simply Not True

July 30, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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“Life begins at conception” is an attempt to make something simple that is in fact complex, and something unambiguous that is uncomfortably blurry. As I have pointed out before, on the one hand, life begins before conception. Sperm and egg cells are alive. It is not “life” that is the question. It is when we are dealing with human personhood. And the example of identical twins (and triplets and other multiple identical births) shows that it is not feasible to... Read more

Ageism, Character, and the 2024 Presidential Election

July 9, 2024 By James F. McGrath

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President Biden’s performance in the 2024 presidential debate was disappointing, but I would like to suggest that that is not the issue that anyone should be focusing on right now. As Rev. Jacqueline Lewis writes, And I’m puzzled about how we got to a place in this nation’s story in which an 81- year-old president and a 78-year-old former president—a convicted felon—are on that debate stage together and we somehow did not expect what happened. I would have told Biden... Read more