I’m tripping over you, God
In a Newsweek article grandiosely (to put it lightly) entitled Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife published yesterday, Dr. Eben Alexander recounts a story of what it was like to visit Heaven (apparently) and speak with God (apparently) which supposedly took place while he was in a coma due to bacterial meningitis. Alexander’s sole basis for [...]
“Bullshit.”
In today’s news, we hear that a group of high school students were offended and walked out of a talk because they were told that they are too moral to do things like stoning women for being non-virgins on their wedding night or owning slaves. The person giving this talk called them cowards for doing [...]
IIWAPBK and Privilege 101
I think Gene Marks has now been thoroughly excoriated for his column “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” on the Forbes web site last week. In his effort to explain how it’s still possible for underprivileged kids to succeed, he succeeded only in displaying a shocking lack of empathy. By that I don’t mean that he [...]
“Muscular Christianity” and the Penn State Scandal
University of Nebraska Assistant Coach Ron Brown prayed on behalf of his football team and that of Penn State prior to their game on November 12th, in the wake of the latter university’s scandal regarding former head coach Joe Paterno. Which you already know about if you haven’t been living under a rock for roughly [...]
What We Could Have Done
That the band R.E.M.’s break-up and Troy Davis’ highly controversial state mandated execution would have taken place on the same day is probably an interesting coincidence to no one but me. You see, it was at an R.E.M. concert during their “Monster” tour back in 1994 that I, as a high school student, first lifted a finger to [...]
What Rick Santorum Doesn’t Get About Bigotry
The title of this post might sound a little obvious to many who have concluded already that Santorum is a bigot for his anti-gay sentiments. But I think it’s important to take a look at why he was wrong, specifically, when he said this in an interview with Piers Morgan: I think just because we disagree on [...]
Demonstration Denied in Dearborn; Dawud Declares Doubts
Anti-Islam pastor Terry Jones takes his show to Michigan…or at least attempts to. In a bid to become to Muslims what Fred Phelps has been to gays and the military, Jones announced that he and his church would be protesting at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, the largest mosque in North America. But [...]
Afghans Attack U.N. Building, Murder Workers and Each Other After Qur’an Burning
Remember Terry Jones? Not the guy from Monty Python, but the Florida pastor who threatened to burn copies of the Qur’an last August in response to the building of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center a few blocks away from where the World Trade Center used to stand? And the president actually got on television [...]
Making Sense of Tragedy: Was the Earthquake a “Divine Punishment”?
Over at Religion Dispatches Levi McLaughlin, a professor of religion who specializes in East Asian traditions, writes about Tokyo’s governor Shintaro Ishihara describing the tsunami that struck Japan as “divine punishment”: Ishihara, a prize-winning novelist, stage and screen actor, and a populist hero of the Japanese right, has gained notoriety for his willingness to court controversy, [...]
Sue Blackmore Decides That Religions Are Not, in Fact, Viruses of the Mind
Sue Blackmore is one of the go-to voices in the UK on matters of religious thinking and consciousness. She is, believe it or not, an atheist with a PhD in parapsychology. Originally a firm believer in the paranormal, she reached the conclusion in the course of her study that it doesn’t in fact have any [...]
Gretchen Koch
Gretchen recently received her PhD in the Study of Religion from the University of Aarhus in Denmark. She currently lives in Plano, Texas and is working on forming her dissertation into a book, and she serves on the Cognitive Science of Religion Consultation for the American Academy of Religion.
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Contributing Scholars
Guruamrit KhalsaGuruamrit Khalsa is an MA candidate at American University's School of International Service studying U.S. foreign policy and South Asia. She has studied the Arabic and Urdu languages, and was a former intern with the Middle East Institute in Washington.
Ben MatonBen is a husband of one, father of three, a member of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Charlottesville, VA, and a PhD candidate in "Scripture, Interpretation, and Practice" at the University of Virginia.
James CroftJames is a teacher, researcher, actor, singer and a proud, gay Humanist. He teaches and studies toward his Doctorate in Human Development at Harvard University, where he works closely with the Humanist Chaplaincy.