Disclaimer: I am a skinny-jeans-wearing, Pitchfork-reading, banjo-playing writer for an alt-weekly newspaper. I am 10 years younger than my bicycle. And I am here to tell you that not all hipsters are terrible people.
I’ve known plenty of the ones you are thinking of when I say the word “hipster”: chain-smoking beardos with deeper V-necks [...]
One of the most influential visions of Christian apologetics in the history of Western Christianity comes from Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, where the figure of the apostle Paul encountering Stoic and Epicurean philosophers at Athens (Acts 17) becomes inflected with the oratorical skills of a Ciceronian rhetorician:
the interpreter and teacher of [...]
A weird thing happened the other day. As some old friends from college were considering catching a movie together, and emails were flying around in an effort to agree on one, a line in one of those emails made me laugh out loud, and then immediately get really sad.
“We’re trying to avoid Rated-R movies.”
[...]
Mattias: “Dad, I forgive you.”
Me: “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Mattias: “That’s okay. I forgive you anyway.”
-Mattias, 5 years, 1 month
I’m a big, gigantic jerk of a dad.
My son, Mattias, is a charmer. As introverted and crowd-averse as I am, he feeds off the energy of a [...]
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, [...]
Follow Us
Facebook
Twitter
- No public Twitter messages.
Advertisement
Tags
Abortion Albert Mohler Andrew Sullivan Atheism Barack Obama Bible Book Review Books Catholic Church Christian Christianity Christianity Today Christian Right Conservatives Dinesh D'Souza Evangelicalism Evangelicals Facebook Faith Feminism God History Jesus Mark Driscoll Marriage Marvin Olasky Media New Sincerity New York City New York Times Patheos Philosophy Politics Quote of the Day Religion Religion and Spirituality Rick Perry Rob Bell Ross Douthat Same-sex marriage Sarah Palin Sex Theology United States WomenArchives
