Posted inEditor's Pick

Is That All There Is?

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

Change We Can (Almost) Believe In

The American obsession with transformation isn’t new. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the “infinitude of man.” In 1879, Mary Baker Eddy founded the religion of Christian Science, premised on the limitless power of faith and mind. Norman Vincent Peale was an early best-selling self-help author with The Power of […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

The New Humanism

There was no objection to chapel and Sunday school … But my home was a religion-free zone: no grace before meals, no prayers at bedtime, and the Bible wedged firmly on the shelf between the Oxford Dictionary and Winston Churchill’s “History of the Second World War.”

Posted inEditor's Pick

Mandates of Heaven

Religion hadn’t lost its capacity to bestow, again according to Breckman, “the consoling message of cosmic meaning and personal redemption,” to comfort countless numbers of its adherents afraid of death and acquainted with grief, to illuminate the masterpieces of Chartres Cathedral and the Mass in B Minor, to introduce Gerard Manley Hopkins to the power […]

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