Reading Time: 14 minutes If I’m right, then it doesn’t matter at all how many people Heath Lambert loses over his demand.
Christianity
Posted inReligion
Trust in pastors is dropping, and Southern Baptists think they know why
Reading Time: 10 minutes Misplaced trust makes Christians say “Oh no, my pastor would never do that!” It grants pastors a shield they do not deserve.
Posted inEthics and Morality
When living kids become organ donors
Reading Time: 4 minutes The passage below, quoting “Anna,” the traumatized child protagonist in Jodi Picoult’s disquieting novel, My Sister’s Keeper, sets the messy table for this essay: My parents tried to make things normal, but that’s a relative term. The truth is, I was never really a kid. To be honest, neither were Kate and Jesse. I guess maybe […]
Posted inLatest research
Census: Christianity in UK on the back foot
Reading Time: 4 minutes The 2021 national census in England and Wales seems like a long time ago now, but the data is only just being released after aggregation and analysis. As reported recently, non-religion in the UK is in the ascendancy and Christianity is in decline. The latest statistics reaffirm this. Though the religion question in the census […]
Posted inReligion
What Christians won’t do to defend God’s Marvelous Plan®
Reading Time: 5 minutes God does nothing to explain his Plan and Christians don’t understand it, but that won’t stop them from defending it. Perhaps nothing is harder for them to justify than hell.
Posted inWar and Peace
So this is 90 seconds to midnight
Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first launched, on the cover of the June […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
An evangelical tries to explain Christianity’s decline, fails completely
Reading Time: 14 minutes Every so often, I get a stunning reminder about exactly why evangelicals’ decline won’t end any time soon. This was one of those times. A recent opinion post by a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Dave Miller, lays out what he thinks is “wrong with [them].” He says he’s only trying to get […]
Posted inReligion
How Christians reframe prayer to sound exciting and effective
Reading Time: 7 minutes If there’s one universal complaint I’ve heard from Christians, one monolithic sore spot that seems to affect almost all of them, it is their inability to establish prayer habits. Even the most fervent and gung-ho of them willingly admit that their prayer lives are lacking. But instead of stressing the real-world good of cultivating such […]
Posted inThe Secular
Should Christmas trees be banned in tax-funded public spaces?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Although I’m a committed nontheist and ardent church-state separationist, I’m not inflexible about it. Which is to say I see no good reason to oppose Christmas trees, for example, in public, tax-supported spaces. It’s been a centuries-long American civic tradition to erect Christmas trees all over creation, so to speak—in public and private spaces—and these […]
Posted inReligious News
Disestablish it for its own good: The Church of England and gay marriage
Reading Time: 5 minutes OnlySky · Disestablish It For Its Own Good – The Church Of England And Gay Marriage | Daniel James Sharp I followed with amusement the recent fracas over same-sex marriage in the Church of England. For half a decade, the Church has been debating its doctrines relating to sexuality, and the thought of gentle Anglicans […]