A protest against the evangelical cult of virginity seems to be picking up steam in certain circles of mildly rebellious internet writing this week. It’s been going on for a while, and goes something like: evangelicals have been obsessed with modesty and virginity for too long, and [...]
I started to become interested in anti-semitism as a high school student, in a fairly liberal Catholic educational environment, with a Jewish night-school supplement. Both environments were very open to discussing the history with me (the Catholic side perhaps even more interested, since there was a strong social justice component to the education) but both [...]
Last Wednesday, the Pentagon announced its decision to lift the ban on women serving in combat, opening to them over 237,000 jobs in infantry units. Women have been serving on the frontlines alongside men for the past ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, so while this is an important move, it’s also a recognition of [...]
After James Holmes gunned down moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, a friend of mine asked me if I ever woke up to the news of a mass shooting and expected to know the shooter from our past lives as homeschooled conservative Christians. Given the isolation and the violence we sometimes saw, part [...]
Ex-evangelical Valerie Tarico wrote a post, republished yesterday by Salon, that argues the internet is killing religion. Tarico isn’t very specific about what kind of religion she’s talking about, she uses “organized religion” and evangelical fundamentalism more or less interchangeably. But the claims are interesting: basically, that the availability of information [...]
“NPR was all about God today,” my wife told me a couple days ago when we both got home from work. “In the morning there was a story about the ‘Nones,’ and then another one on the way home. Your friend Chris Stedman was on.”
“Sounds like it was all about not God,” [...]
I can remember a time when “secular” was a dirty word. Growing up in an evangelical home secular meant, primarily, secular music: the kind of music which was forbidden because it was by, of, and for “the world”. To my well-meaning parents, the secularism of secular music was a slippery slope which might cause me, [...]
I wrote a short thing some time ago about the garb of non-ideological non-partisanship in which a younger generation of conservative evangelicals have cloaked themselves. They often explicitly and forcefully position themselves against the religious right, but there is very little substantive difference when you get down to it, [...]
Atlanta pastor Louie Giglio was disinvited from delivering the invocation at President Obama’s second inauguration ceremony after ThinkProgress unearthed a 20-year-old sermon in which he called homosexuality a sin, endorses ex-gay therapy, and utters the usual hyperbole about homosexuality “undermining the whole order of our society.” This isn’t the [...]
Journalist Kathryn Schulz has written a long piece on selfhood that is a lucid lay overview of the philosophical problem of the “self.” The story is framed as a meta-critique of the most popular self-help books, and Schulz points out that the entire enterprise of self-help is based on the tenuous, probably-false idea that [...]
Happy New Year! Pardon this self-promotional interruption to the regularly scheduled program, but I must announce that my first book — it’s either a very long essay or a very short book — has been published by Bondfire Books and is available at all major ebook retailers today. And, as a bonus, for a limited [...]
Since part of my resolution for 2013 is to write every day, it seemed fitting to begin the year by trying to stitch together some disparate things that have been floating around in my brain on the subject of writing, particularly writing on the internet.
When it became clear that blogging was going to be [...]
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