Dancing with the Gods

Just how is one to study religion? The question is not new. It is at the core of the issue of methodology in the human sciences. Controversy has whirled around this issue for many years.

The Buddha and the Gallows

On August 28, 2010, The New York Times had a story about a tour for journalists of the major execution chamber in Tokyo. The tour was initiated by Keiko Chiba, the minister of justice, who is personally opposed to the death penalty. This opposition was apparently intensified last July when, as part of her official […]

Christians, Same-Sex Marriage and Slavery

The Puritan heritage still casts its long shadow over American culture, even if very few Protestants today would identify with Puritan theology in its original form. Puritanism survives in its moral rigidity, its legalism, and its exaggerated notions about the historic mission of the United States. At least among American Protestants, it also survives in […]

Poland Between Rome and Brussels

During much of its modern history Poland was a ball of contention between three imperial centers: Moscow, Vienna and Berlin.  Vienna has long lost any imperial aspirations, Moscow would like to assert them again, and Berlin tries hard to hide them if it has any.  It turns out, though, that Poland is experiencing an internal contention […]

Is "Proselytizing" a Bad Word?

In its July 2010 issue, Christianity Today, the masthead publication of Evangelical Protestantism, reported the merger of two Evangelical organizations engaged in missionary work in the Muslim world: Pioneers USA and Arab World Ministries.  These have a combined total of 2,300 missionaries.  The report does not make clear how many of these are actually trying to […]

American National Interest and the Stoning of Women

On August 17, 2010 The New York Times carried on its first page a story about the stoning for adultery of a couple in a Taliban-controlled area of Afghanistan. (The Times deserves credit—the story hardly supports the anti-war position of the newspaper). The man (Khayyam, aged 25) was married, the woman (Siddiqa, aged 19) was […]

Evangelicals: Sentenced to Lower Case

I suppose that producing a blog makes little sense unless it provides an opportunity to vent personal complaints about the universe and peeves concerning the behavior of people. My list of complaints about the universe gets longer every morning after perusal of The New York Times. I also have a number of very idiosyncratic peeves […]

Counting Christians in China

We know that Christianity has been growing remarkably in recent decades—in China there is talk of “Christianity fever”. We don’t know just how many Christians there are in China at present. The reason for this is simple. Christian churches in China come in two groups: those that are registered and officially recognized by the government, […]

The Return of the Village Atheist

Over the last few years there was published a flurry of books marketed and discussed under the heading of “The New Atheism”.  The best-known authors are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.  While differing in emphasis and style, their books have in common an aggressive, indeed vituperative hostility to religion in all its forms (though […]

Veiled Women and Naked Monks

On July 13 the lower house of the French parliament banned all forms of headgear that hide the face, with the rationale that such garments are “contrary to the values of the French Republic”. One politician put it more poetically:  “The Republic has an open face”.  It was probably not an accident that this law […]

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