Reading Time: 8 minutes OnlySky · I belong to me | Dani Ward Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concepts of agency and autonomy, how necessary they are for a fulfilling life…and how impossible they are when consent is ignored. I’ve been realizing with a growing sense of anger and frustration that I had no grasp of […]
evangelical Christianity
Posted inReligious News
Pat Robertson, the apocalypse, and why Christians are obsessed with Israel
Reading Time: 5 minutes Unable to watch another global conflict unfold without making it about his own team, televangelist and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson popped his head in again last week to comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To the surprise of no one, he informed his followers that this is the sign of the apocalypse […]
Posted inReligion
Evangelical Christians: Your God has boundary issues
Reading Time: 7 minutes I know it’s customary to blame Christianity’s problems on the bad apples that spoil the bunch, but I don’t think that really gets to the core of the problem. Remember how Jesus said if the fruit is bad, you should be looking at the tree to figure out what’s wrong? Let’s do that then, shall […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
What good are atheists in a world steeped in religion?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Religion News Service posted an article recently about the group exodus of nonreligious bloggers from Patheos over the last few weeks, along with the launch of OnlySky, a new multimedia platform aimed at reaching an ever-broadening population who are no longer looking for heaven to solve our problems. When we look up, we see only […]
Posted inPolitics
Why the church keeps getting Covid wrong
Reading Time: 5 minutes I live in the Deep South, and now that the Delta variant is here, I’m back to wearing a mask again wherever I go. School started back for us last week, and masks are mandatory because our district doesn’t have any wealthy white people bullying the school board into disregarding the pleas of every hospital […]
Posted inGeneral
Why the gospel doesn’t work on exvangelicals
Reading Time: 8 minutes People like me are like flies in the ointment of evangelical theology. We did all the things they told us to do, we gave our hearts and our lives entirely over to Jesus, yet in the end we still found their belief system lacking. It’s not supposed to happen that way. We must have done […]
Posted inPolitics
Four ways Tim Keller’s gospel falls flat
Reading Time: 11 minutes In the penultimate chapter of his Reason for God, Tim Keller attempts to pull together all the loose threads strewn about this apologetic work, weaving them together into a coherent vision for the world. He offers his belief system as a superior alternative to the one the rest of the world wants you to accept, […]
Posted inCulture, Religion
God Is Not to Blame for This
Reading Time: 8 minutes A younger friend recently told me she knows a number of guy friends who don’t care much for female artists. “Any female artists?” I asked her. “Any,” she replied, as if there’s something fundamental to being female that makes one less capable of making good art. I found this difficult to absorb. How could anyone […]
Posted inCritical thinking, Religion, Secularism
C.S. Lewis and the Art of Holy Deception
Reading Time: 11 minutes It only recently occurred to me that I am now older than C.S. Lewis was when he first delivered the Broadcast Talks for BBC Radio upon which his later book Mere Christianity was based. Like him, I have been a teacher for decades; but unlike him, I have also spent decades parenting several children and […]
Posted inCritical thinking, Philosophy
C.S. Lewis and the Argument from Wishing
Reading Time: 10 minutes Yesterday I posted the first of what I plan to become a series of chapter reviews of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I know I’m late to this game—others have already dissected this work many times over—but I’ve never written out my own thoughts for those who would want to know them. It’s long overdue. […]