Huckabee hearts Herod; Christian-brand media reaches the reached; despite bankruptcy, Amish romance novel supply is secure; "She stands up on a night train;" David Barton's record-breaking athletic history; and a heartfelt plea to Save the Bros. Read more
You can learn a lot about ethics and human nature from reading the collected works of Reinhold Niebuhr, plus the Nicomachean Ethics, and, say, Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre. Or you can just watch this five-minute video from Jay Smooth, which sums it all up and stitches it together quite nicely. Read more
This framework grants an advantage to one kind of religion over the other. One strain is rewarded with the presumption of authenticity. The other is punished with the presumption of a lack of conviction. That grants the former greater influence within the religious tradition, and greater influence in the larger society. I'd prefer we didn't do that. Read more
I should warn you that purchasing this collection will almost certainly mean that you won't be Raptured. I don't believe that Killer Vengeance Jesus is coming back to snatch away all the Real, True Christians, but in the unlikely event that such a thing does happen, the possession of this e-book will almost certainly disqualify you from being whisked off to Heaven. You will be left behind with the rest of us sinners. Read more
The position of missionaries can produce exotic invasive religion and theological Spam. Also: Too much snow; on the varieties of religious education; good news from Oslo; and the necessity of eloquent profanity. Read more
Wendell Berry on the gospel of war; Addie Zierman wishes youth ministers would stop urging kids to "stay strong for God;" Elizabeth Stoker Breunig on religious authenticity; and Rod Dreher remembers his days as a Real, True Christian awaiting the Rapture. Read more
"So they made their father drink wine that night also; and the younger rose, and lay with him; and he did not know when she lay down or when she rose. Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father." Read more
Haykel's comments were widely criticized because they were so familiar. It's the same old language that religious fundamentalists always use to try to delegitimize the faith of non-fundies. It's the same language that white evangelical Christians constantly use to try to discredit mainline Protestants. It's the same language used in most of the hate-mail that I get as a non-fundie religious blogger. Read more
I think of this as a Yeatsian framework because it privileges the supposedly "more authentic" forms of religion due to their passionate intensity, while disregarding the supposedly "less authentic" due to their imagined lack of all conviction. And because it admires the passionate intensity of what I consider the worst aspects of religion while dismissing what I consider the best of religion as nothing more than that lack of conviction. Read more
The compulsion to elevate oneself as the righteous remnant, and to draw boundaries between Real True Believers and everyone else, is the hallmark of a particular strain of fundamentalist religion. It is a mark of religion that, I think, has elevated the cardinal sin above the cardinal virtue -- substituting pride for love. That pride drives the obsessive need to constantly make and enforce distinctions between Us, the righteous few, and Them, the apostate hordes falsely claiming the name of our religion as they trundle down the broad path toward destruction. Read more
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