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The Atlantic

The Atlantic

I think religion should be taught in college. I’m not talking about “religious studies,” that is, the study of the phenomenon of religion. I’m talking about having imams, priests, pastors, rabbis, and other clerics teach the practice of their faiths. In college classrooms. To college students. For credit. I think religion should be taught in college because I believe it can help save floundering undergraduates. I’m not talking about “saving” them in Christian sense. I’m talking about teaching them how to live so they do not have to suffer an endless stream of miseries.

Author seems a bit frightened of Christianity. What about lions, tigers and bears!

I tried, of course, to get help for these students. But there was no help to be had at the university. I called their advisors—if I could discover their names—to see if they might render aid. In most cases these advisors did not even know the students’ names. I called the university’s counseling center to see if there was anyone on staff who might be able to help. “Have the student come in and make an appointment. We should be able to see her in a week.” I would have gladly called their parents, and I imagine their parents would have been more than willing to reach out. But, remarkably, the “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act” forbids university officials from contacting parents in all but the most extreme cases. These lost students, then, had nowhere to turn.

This sermon illustration writes itself. 

http://theallendercenter.org/2012/09/the-power-of-the-pastor

HT The Dish Molly Alice’s “every conversation I’ve had this week”

Both sides give in to condescension. Why is the Christian so reactive? Probably self-righteousness and the Christian can’t stomach a challenge to their own morality, which is a common but deep betrayal of what Christianity is supposed to be about.

We don’t really believe the quote I posted yesterday. In other words, the Christian isn’t being honest. The Christian in this picture remains consumed by their own self and their self-righteousness.

The gospel is for admitted failures, for confessed incompetents, in short, for people like all of us when we are honest. The incomprehension and incompetence, almost the rudeness and even perhaps the slight contempt detectible in both Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman may all be intended by John to say to readers: Jesus’ promises are for problematic people; get used to it; be grateful.

Bruner, F. D. (2012). The Gospel of John: A Commentary (p. 250). Grand Rapids, MI;Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans.

Commonweal HT Dreher

Friedrich Nietzsche has a strong claim to being the first real atheist. Of course there had been unbelievers in abundance before him, but it is Nietzsche above all who confronts the terrifying, exhilarating consequences of “the death of God.” As long as God’s shoes have been filled by Reason, art, culture, Geist, imagination, the nation, humanity, the state, the People, society, morality, or some other such specious surrogate, the Supreme Being is not quite dead. He may be mortally sick, but he has delegated his affairs to one envoy or another, part of whose task is to convince men and women that there is no cause for alarm, that business will be conducted as usual despite the absence of the proprietor.

In an age in which the concept of certainty smacks of the tyrant and technocrat, a certain agnosticism becomes a virtue.

The faithlessness of advanced capitalism is built into its routine practices. It is not primarily a question of the piety or skepticism of its citizens. The marketplace would continue to behave atheistically even if every one of its actors was a born-again Evangelical.

The Week

For many advocates of gay marriage, liberalism is a holistic, comprehensive ideology with its own distinctive vision of the human good. This vision advocates the autonomy of individuals from received traditions and their liberation from constraints both external (political, social, cultural, religious) and internal (psychological), which it invariably treats as forms of oppression. Liberalism in this sense denies that sexuality should be subject to moral judgment or evaluation of any kind, beyond the consent of the parties involved in the sexual act. As long as consent has been given, anything goes.

In addition to holding out this ideal of individual autonomy, comprehensive liberalism demands that each individual’s choice of how to live be recognized and positively affirmed by everyone else, no matter what it involves (as long as it doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s equally free lifestyle choice). Comprehensive liberals also tend to treat the refusal to grant this recognition and affirmation as an act of illiberalism that ought not be tolerated. Many go so far as to think that liberal governments should force the recalcitrant to comply with the liberal ideal, at least in any area of life that can plausibly be described as public.

 

Unwholesome Complexity

Literalism simply isn’t possible. Attempts to hold fast to a literal interpretation lead to a multitude of speculations, twists and contortions – from the crystalline canopy theory (here) to the suggestion that the plants of Genesis 1:11-12 didn’t include agricultural plants because these were only created after Adam as we read in Genesis 2:5-8.

The two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 provide an excellent case in point. Osborn works through attempts that have been made to force these into scientific and chronological agreement, flattening them into a single linear historical narrative. Apparently in the sixth day God created the land animals, then Adam, then the (agricultural) plants, then after noting that it was not good for Adam to be alone, brought the animals and birds out of hiding (since they had all been created before Adam in the Genesis 1 account) and paraded them before Adam to be named. As there are only 60×24=1440 minutes in the day this must have been a super-speed process … So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals (Genesis 2:20) … thousands of species, according to a strict literalism.  Then and only then was the woman created (also a first-day product setting a limit on the time available for the naming process).

Slate HT The Dish

“Yoga is the new prayer”

and Buddhism, How the 1% hijacked mindfulness.

Of course, Ream’s criticism is nothing new. Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek has long argued that “Western Buddhism,” as he calls it, is an ideal palliative for the stresses of life under late capitalism — their “perfect ideological supplement.”