truth

After detailing the factual evidence, Kenneth Surin argues that the demands of truth and justice require Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinian people to be halted.

I used to be quite interested in contemporary Christian apologetics (and by “contemporary” I mean something like “modernist”). That is, until I realized that the foundationalism necessary to undergird the enterprise actually tends to undermine the Christian faith it intends to uphold. For example, in the ongoing arguments between evolution and creationism (including the other […]

  If not for his tragic suicide back in 2008, today would have been the fifty-first birthday of award-winning writer David Foster Wallace. By nearly any account, Wallace was the greatest talent of his generation. In addition to his sparkling fiction, which included sprawling, encyclopedic novels such as Infinite Jest and beautifully crystalline short short stories […]

Over the past several days, I have seen at least two dozen friends and acquaintances on Facebook and Twitter post a link to this web comic from The Oatmeal entitled “How To Suck at Your Religion.” This comic, written by Oatmeal founder Matthew Inman, was re-posted several times by friends of mine who are atheists and agnostics […]

Before moving to North Carolina to begin a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill, I lived just outside of Nashville, TN. During my four years there, many of my friends were Nashville natives and even more of them were aspiring audio engineers, producers, and recordings artists who came to the city hoping to find work on Music […]

Many of the most important debates of the recent “worship wars” in evangelicalism (including the form/content divide identified in yesterday’s post) have their origins in two important conflicts from the first few decades of the Reformation: first, the debate over the exegesis of the Ten Commandments or “Decalogue,” and second, a broader conversation about the […]

Just last week, I was reading Deena Weinstein’s landmark 1991 study Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology and I was nearly stopped in my tracks by the final chapter, which deals with metal’s “detractors” from across the political spectrum. While conservative criticisms of heavy metal are well-known through the work of groups like the Parents Music […]

The idea of “deconstruction” has achieved a somewhat surprising ubiquity in our current culture. In addition to relatively long-standing applications in literary and cultural criticism, deconstruction has also found a home in political punditry and haute cuisine (what does it mean to “deconstruct” a meatloaf anyway?). But perhaps most enamored with the idea of deconstruction […]

It is the liturgical season of Lent, week two. Lent is Latin for “spring,” the season in which life sprouts, blossoms, hatches, emerges forth. The prophet Isaiah proclaims, The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. […]