Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on Moving Past Hatred. Read other perspectives here. Like cars, SUVs and trucks, religions can become weapons if we are not careful. We need to “use” them well. The need to be aware of religions’ potency for good and evil has never been more pressing. The inter-religious world gets smaller by the day through globalization, just as the roads on which we drive get smaller and smaller the more... Read more

*This blog post is part of a series of entries on education in contemporary society.  I remember reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and learning about his life story.[1] Though born into a middle class home in Brazil, his family experienced the impact of the Great Depression and moved to a less expensive city. During those years, his father died. He fell behind in school, but learned a great deal from other poor children. He realized that his playmates... Read more

Capitalism works. Darwinism works. But do they work well enough? Many believe that capitalism effectively encourages individual enterprise for the sake of making profit in a competitive economic environment. Many also maintain that Darwinism effectively describes the process of natural selection, where the biologically fittest survive. But what happens to meaning, if all that exists in market economies and nature are the equivalents of “inertial masses, bouncing merely casually” [not causally] “against each other in public space”?—to borrow a line... Read more

The fatal, tragic shooting rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon yesterday highlights how vulnerable we all are. We should not take people’s lives  for granted, even though many question today if life has any real meaning or value. As I watched the footage last night and grieved the horror, I thought to myself: what a senseless waste of precious life! What made sense to me were individuals who confessed faith in Christ in the midst of the tragedy.... Read more

According to popular opinion among certain groups of creationists and Darwinians alike, Darwin devalued humanity and biblical religion. Is this view accurate? Darwinian evolution teaches that humans developed from other, simpler life forms. In fact, all of life for Darwin has a common ancestry, possibly having emerged from some “warm little pond,” as he wrote in a letter to J.D. Hooker in 1871. Still, given that life has developed in increasingly complex ways over the ages, evolution does not put... Read more

“If I weren’t a Christian, I’d be a Buddhist.” I remember sharing these words several years ago during an apologetics seminar in the Pacific Northwest. I was concerned that the Christians with whom I was sharing about a Christian engagement of various religious traditions, including Buddhism, did not realize how deep, mysterious and profound many non-Christian faiths are. When we view religious others in superficial ways, we often approach them and their arguments as straw men, which we can easily... Read more

Was Newton a friend or foe of religion? What about nature? Let’s start with religion. I suppose it depends on the meaning of ‘religion.’ From the vantage point of Trinitarian faith, the answer would be “no.” He was vehement in his rejection of the received Trinitarian orthodoxy of his day. Newton’s view of God resembled the ancient heretical doctrine of Arianism with his belief that Jesus was first among created beings, and whom God elevated as his subordinate and mediator... Read more

If one were to argue that the Church’s fallout with Galileo was one of science vs. religion, one would also need to argue that it was about science vs. science, biblical interpretation vs. biblical interpretation, and politics as well as personalities. In fact, one would be hard pressed back in Galileo’s day to separate religion, science, and politics. They were often intertwined. Further to my recent post on Copernican thought,[1] the following quotation puts forth several of the issues surrounding... Read more