It turns out that life is not a competition. It’s not a test. Or, if life is a test, treating it like a test is one surefire way to fail it. Philosophy is no contest either. You are welcome to try, but philosophy is a piss-poor way to slay the primal father. When it comes […]
“Cult” as a label has recently re-entered national conversation on the heels of conservative voters trying to figure out how to best think about Mitt Romney’s Mormon religious affiliation. The ensuing confusion expressed at times in this debate is a good example of how fluid and misunderstood this term often is. For recent generations, the […]
Tim Suttle offers a social gospel vision of evangelicalism that calls Christians beyond the individualistic constrictions of contemporary Christianity to a retrieval of the social dimensions of the good news.
From a tree stump in New Jersey to a tree stump in Houston: it’s enough to give the person the idea that Mary could be an environmentalist. Good for her, I guess, but not so much for me. I want to see the Virgin of Guadalupe! Is that too much to ask? Apparently, she has […]
The Secret World of Arrietty, the new Studio Ghibli film, isn’t really a Miyazaki, but you could easily mistake it for one. Disney’s marketing has carefully pitched the film as being “from the studio that brought you Spirited Away and Ponyo,” both Miyazakis, and it could happily fit somewhere between those films and another of […]
Evolution has been accused of evil by friend, foe, and doubter. Many creationists think that “evolution,” the theory not the thing, is a font of evil. They charge that it teaches us that we are “nothing but animals,” and so leads inevitably to nihilism. The fruits of evolution in this sense, according to prominent creationist Ken […]
The film is ultimately an examination of how even seemingly random events are subtly connected in ways that nobody can truly foresee, and how even the most insignificant or arbitrary decision or action can have far-reaching consequences.
More or less, I started reading Derrida because of dinosaurs. I was twenty-three. I’d spent two years as the Mormon equivalent of an itinerant monk, celibate, media-less, begging bowl in hand, white shirt yellowing, bike peddles peddling, 24/7. I was pretty serious and I had a lot of questions. Christianity and postmodernity look like an […]
In this interview, the experimental psychologist Richard Beck shares insight from his book Unclean and discusses the ways in which disgust psychology provides confessing Christians with a sobering and instructive reality about the nature of evil.
