Religion Is All About Sex?
The Freudian take on religion, that it is all about sex, or more precisely all about repressed sexual urges, is hardly new. Nevertheless, it was somewhat startling when renowned sociologist of religion Peter Berger returned to this trope last week on his The American Interest blog in an entry entitled “Religion As An Activity Engaged [...]
Politicians Say the Darndest Things
Politicians say the darndest things. Of course, it’s never as cute as when kids say the darndest things. In fact, it’s usually downright awful. For example, on Sunday, Representative Todd Akin, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, was quoted as saying, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to [...]
Boston Candlelight Vigil – United Against Hate
Yesterday evening, the Boston University Sikh Association hosted a citywide vigil at the University’s Marsh Chapel as a communal response to the attack on the Sikh temple in Milwaukee this past weekend, during which six people were killed. As the University Chaplain for Community Life at Marsh Chapel, I was asked to speak at the [...]
Meditation on the Deaths of Three Students
Three Boston University students died on Saturday. It was Saturday in New Zealand, anyway. It was still Friday here in Boston. They were going out into the countryside to hike one of the most scenic trails on the face of the planet. They were going to experience beauty and grandeur, but instead thy met pain [...]
The Problem with Freshmen
Here at Boston University, we are in the throes of our sixth orientation session, out of eight, for incoming undergraduates. When you matriculate about 4,200 undergrads each fall, it takes a while to get them all informed about the workings of student life and registered for courses. The existential situation of an incoming undergraduate has [...]
Inquiry to Delta Airlines
The following is the text of a message I sent to Delta Airlines in response to the incident of two Imams being removed from a Delta flight at the behest of one of their pilots. More information about the incident is available here. Hello, I am writing in regards to a customer care issue not [...]
Chaos, Apparently
I thoroughly enjoy reading David Brooks’ columns in The New York Times. I particularly enjoy his columns parsing social science literature. How many columnists in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter, are well versed in the current trends in evolutionary psychology or biological anthropology? And so I was quite pleased to delve [...]
Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda – Spiderman
<<<SPOILER ALERT!>>> Last night I went to see Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway, (from the second row, no less). Significant controversy surrounds the show, which has provided much comedic material to the likes of Saturday Night Live and Conan O’Brian. One reason may be the cost, coming in at over $65 million (or [...]
Student Christian Movement – USA
About ten days before embarking on a 12 day trip to Atlanta to attend two conferences I got one of those out-of-the-blue emails that both clergy and graduate students are prone to receive. At first I was confused because the “from” line of the email read the name of a friend I haven’t been in [...]
Vocation at the Heart of Formation
What a rich blessing it was to help host the Fund for Theological Education’s Leaders in Ministry Conference at Boston University, June 16-20, 2010. Having been an FTE Undergraduate and Ministry Fellow in 2004-2006, it was great both to give something back to an organization that was at the heart of my own formation process [...]
Br. Larry Whitney
Br. Larry is the University Chaplain for Community Life at Boston University's Marsh Chapel and an STM student in philosophical theology at the Boston University School of Theology.
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Contributing Scholars
Rachel A. HeathRachel Heath is currently completing her graduate studies at Yale Divinity School. While living in New Haven, she has been both a community organizer for public housing residents and an interfaith chaplain at a local hospital. In between cups of hazelnut coffee she works as an intern for the Yale Chaplain's Office and focuses on the positive convergence of interfaith dialogue and community service.
Tiffany BuchananTiffany is a Master of Divinity student at McCormick Theological Seminary. She has a Master of Arts degree in Sociology specializing in Organizations and Institutions and Social Psychology. She founded and is the Executive Director of a non-profit Education Outreach firm, Love Learning Empowerment. She is an aspiring author and poet. You can follow her @ twitter.com/Radiant_Blossom
Ben DeVanBenjamin B. DeVan has taught religion, philosophy, and African American literature at North Carolina Central University, Peace College, and a January term mini-course at MIT titled, "Religion: Bringing the World Together, or Tearing the World Apart?" He completed his MA in Counseling at Asbury Theological Seminary, his MDiv at Duke University, a ThM at Harvard in World Religions with a thesis on evangelical Christians and Muslims, and is now a doctoral candidate at a historic British university writing a dissertation on the New Atheism.