I am afraid of dying. Not death. Dying. Death is short, you see. But dying, that might take a while. I’m not the only one. I’m thinking about that a lot on this day, the tenth of September, which has been delegated World Suicide Prevention Day. I’m not typically a “World Something-Something Day” type. For this I make an exception. Partly because this article is on my mind. The topic is “rational suicide”: suicide when you are not clinically depressed,… Read more
September 10, 2018
George Saunders Contra Rational Suicide
September 10, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
0 Comments
September 8, 2018
Is There an Atheist Alt-Right Connection?
September 8, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
55 Comments
[Update: In the course of this article, I conjecture that the secular humanist blogger I’m engaging with would consider himself a human exceptionalist. Since then, I have found an article where he emphatically rejects this label. I stand corrected and educated, though with no fewer questions for him.] Recently, I was approached with an invitation to have a dialogue on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? radio show with secular humanist James Croft, a Patheos neighbor on the non-religious network. Details are still being worked out,… Read more
September 5, 2018
Rich Mullins Had Praise & Worship’s Number
September 5, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
2 Comments
For fans of Rich Mullins, YouTube’s one-stop Mullins shop the Ragamuffin Archive is bringing you Christmas early. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Mullins legacy-preservers Andrew Montonera and Joe Cook, lost footage from an old workshop taped by LeSea broadcasting is being digitized and released to the public. Some of Mullins’s best teaching and live moments were taped at this workshop over the course of a couple days and have been available for years. But what fans didn’t know was… Read more
September 1, 2018
Millennial Christians Are No Wiser Than Their Parents
September 1, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
74 Comments
If the older generation of evangelicals could be foolish and naive, the next generation is no wiser, despite the impression The New Yorker would like to give. Read more
August 28, 2018
Though Rome Falls, the Church Stands
August 28, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
4 Comments
I can picture the scene vividly. The place is the Domus Sanctae Marthae. The time is the morning of June 20, 2013. The Domus is pulsing with activity, voices rising and falling, feet coming and going on the lobby’s marbled floor. Gathered together from the world’s four corners, the Church’s apostolic nuncios have converged on this point in space-time. Tomorrow the pope will address them as one. A man enters the hall. He has flown in from Washington, weary with… Read more
August 16, 2018
The Lost Witness of Mark Heard
August 16, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
7 Comments
Today marks twenty-six years since the passing of an artist very few people would recognize by name. At the time of his death from a heart attack, he was forty years old. The world didn’t know what they had lost. The real tragedy is that the church didn’t know what they had lost either. Perhaps this is because Mark Heard resided in that most thankless of artistic spaces: the space where Christians try to make good art. When we lost him,… Read more
August 13, 2018
Christians Should Say “No” to Revoice’s “Vocation of Yes”
August 13, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
37 Comments
A lot of ink has been spilled in the evangelical blogosphere about the recently concluded Revoice conference. This conference was a gathering together of mostly same-sex attracted Christians who affirm traditional church teaching on the morality of homosexual acts, yet seek to reshape conversations about homosexuality in the church. One of its chief promoters was writer and theologian Wesley Hill, who has written books about his own personal story and co-founded the Spiritual Friendship movement. Last week, Hill wrote a… Read more
August 6, 2018
In Eighth Grade, the Kids Are Not All Right
August 6, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
1 Comment
“I’m sorry, but if you were seeing this with your parents…[and] you didn’t want your parents to know what 8th grade was really like for you…you just got, like, exposed.” – Eden, an 8th-grader It’s the pitch-perfect indie hit of the year. It’s a masterpiece of “queasy verisimilitude.” It’s a film so unwaveringly authentic, viewers are describing it as a cross between “must-see” and “see between your fingers.” Is it a horror movie? Officially, no. It’s a movie about being… Read more
August 3, 2018
The Awkward Christian Witness
August 3, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
19 Comments
I confess: I want to be cool. A little cool, at least. A little square too, but square in a hip, retro way that conveniently wraps back around to the ultimate goal: cool. I don’t like this about myself. My one consolation is that you’re probably like me. Inasmuch as I’m human, and you’re human, I have a terrible feeling we’re pretty much stuck with this. They’ve even given it a name: FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. Every marketer knows… Read more
July 30, 2018
Thanks Jordan Peterson, I’ll Take Sam Harris From Here
July 30, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
128 Comments
Well, that escalated quickly. When I published this piece on the Jordan Peterson/Sam Harris debates a week ago today, I expected it would pick up some attention. I’m active in various Jordan Peterson fan groups on FaceBook and Reddit, so like a good Patheos author I hustled it about. For a couple of days, it did quite well. Both the Peterson and Harris fanbases, typically at each other’s throats, enjoyed a rare bipartisan moment by giving me almost universally positive… Read more
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