Category: The Enchanted Ones
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Old Time Religion
Last week, I read two essays. One was by a columnist in a trendy urban magazine, writing against teaching Intelligent Design as science in public schools. One was by a conservative academic, writing against the demand that public speech and conduct should be sensitive or “politically correct”.
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God Jokes
Comedian Emo Phillips, writing in the Guardian Online, takes credit here for a joke voted the funniest religious joke of all time at the Ship of Fools. There are several other religious jokes in the story. Under modern British law, and under the law in many European countries, I suppose Phillips is on shaky ground…
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Hmmm
A recent story from the Times of London, on line, about a social study in the Journal of Religion and Society attempting to correlate religious practice with other social events. The Journal looks like a serious journal. The article in question, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous…
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Scientific Pharisees
There is a feature article on Richard Dawkins in the September 2005 issue of Discover magazine, by Stephen S. Hall, Darwin’s Rottweiler. It isn’t in the archives yet – only the first few paragraphs are on line. Hall credits the title of his article to Alister McGrath, in his book Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and…
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Ruse on Evolution
In May, the Boston Globe (online) published an interview of zoologist, philosopher of science and popular writer Michael Ruse discussing his new book The Evolution-Creation Struggle. More recently, the American Scientist Online published another interview. The book expands on the arguments made in an article Is Evolution a Secular Religion, published in Science Magazine in…
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Van Gogh Murder News
An update on the stories mentioned in my entry on Pluralism, Dutch Style. The Dutch Courts have convicted the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. The BBC reported that Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was convicted of murder. Another BBC report on the public reactions to the case in Holland mentioned that he is…
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Foucault’s Spirituality
Neat. The English online version of a Turkish paper has a interview with James W. Bernauer, the American author of several books on the French philosopher Michel Foucault, tied in to the publication of a Turkish translation of one of his books. Bernauer teaches at Boston College and many of his books and papers identify…
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Philosophy or Religion
My review of Edward Craig’s Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction summarized his loose description of philosophy, which talked about understanding mystery. At the risk of embellishing his carefully elliptical description of the venture, he was talking about the great mystery of self-aware minds, awake in ape-like bodies, living among similiar beings with similiar physical and…
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Voluntary Simplicity
Voluntary Simplicity, has been around for 25 years, the first edition having been published in 1981. The author, Duane Elgin, describes himself as a former senior social scientist connected with an institution in California, and his biography mentions a business degree and an MA in economic history. He seems to presently support himself as a…
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Retail Wages
Here’s an article in Christianity Today on living wages and Wal-Mart called “Deliver us from Wal-Mart“. This article takes a liberal Christian look at a social and ethical issue.