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.
HE year was 1965. Martin Luther was scheduled to speak at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the school his wife Coretta Scott King attended. There was a plot to assassinate him while in town to speak at the event. It was called off due to a KKK rally in another Ohio town about thirty minutes away.
LL of us fail at some point to live up to what we see as our moral code. That should not be confused with disagreeements about what is indeed the moral code. So many contemporary issues trace their way back to what is the source of the moral code and who is able to tinker with it. That’s a point I tried to make in recent interviews about the United Methodist Church.
MERICA had recently pulled out of Vietnam. The hippy movement was in full swing. A lot of people were sick of the kind of “progress” that led to the prolonged conflict. A whole lot of influences converged to make people look to the East, and away from the West, for a better way. And Star Wars was born.
UKE’S Gospel includes the most famous passage about the Incarnation thanks to Charlie Brown’s friend Linus. Luke then gives precious few details about Jesus’s childhood, mainly an anecdote about Jesus getting left behind in a Temple. The next logical step is for Luke to trace out Jesus’s genealogy. I’m kidding. It kind of doesn’t make sense why he does it that way.
