AST week I published a post about how often religious groups ground their beliefs in the Bible, but then extend the authority of Scripture beyond what seems reasonable. It’s easy to do. I’m sure I’ve been guilty before. You feel confident of your interpretation of a text but then give equal credence to your nuanced application. It’s easy to conflate the two.
HAT is more important, the Word of God or the tradition of man? For conservative Christians, this seems rather straight forward and easy. But our actions might show otherwise.
N his book The Artist’s Way of Preaching, Charles Denison says, “Most people do not read poetry, but the preacher should!” I wholeheartedly agree. But I will go a step further, I think preachers should listen to poetry too.
ATCHING “Thor: Ragnarok,” a Marvel movie about the superhero character inspired by Greek mythology (for the uninitiated), my son Isaiah’s response to a scene made me think about Christianity. Stan Lee makes a cameo in every Marvel movie as he is the creative brain behind the galactic enterprise. In this particular Thor film, Lee is a barber who cuts off Thor’s hair in a rather biblical kind of Samson meets Delilah moment.
AST week a media outlet from New York (Refinery 29) asked me to offer some thoughts about how people can have a meaningful Easter experience. Here’s a link to the article that was published on Good Friday. The bit I was hoping to make it into the piece didn’t, so I thought I include my full comments here.
CIENCE is a wonderful thing. It’s a tool to explore the physical world. But when people use the tool of science, they bring a set of assumptions to both the way they use it and to the kind of conclusions they form based on their use of it. Often, what is called science is much more than just the set of tools to study the physical world, but a total worldview that includes assumptions that are outside of the reach of science and are far better described as religious beliefs.
UGENICS is the science of improving the human species. That might not sound too ominous. Who doesn’t like improvement? But this sort of thinking led to some of the most horrific human actions in history. Yet, that didn’t keep famed atheist Richard Dawkins from commending it on Twitter.
HE weekend edition of The Wall street Journal carried a story by the title, “What the Bible Taught Lincoln About America.” Author Rabbi Soloveichik, director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, outlines how Lincoln, once indifferent to religion, turned into a “theologian of liberty” during the Civil War.
ESEARCHERS don’t know what to make of a new study that shows how the universe shouldn’t exist. A perfect symmetry between protons and antiprotons would cancel each other out since they annihilate one another when they come into contact. So there should be an imbalance between them. But there isn’t.
