Sometimes, of course, what integrity and grace require is that believers do abandon indefensible empirical claims, and that they do so with generosity and care. And there is still good and important work for churches to do in the world, even from within the epistemological ghettos of metaphor, meaning, and value. A number of my Facebook friends posted no stinging ridicule but rather a gentle domestication of the rapture meme: that rapture can be found every day in the faces of children, or that every day is the catastrophic end of someone's world and the beginning of someone else's. There is something lost when religion abandons or reduces its claims. But if it can continue to lead us out of ourselves toward compassion and empathy, it is an honorable poverty.
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