Over at the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has weighed in with his review of Elaine Pagels’ newest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations. In a previous post, I excerpted a lecture in which Pagels discusses the book and its themes. Gopnik’s review is a nice companion.
In keeping with a persistent [...]
Tags:Adam Gopnik·Christian mysticism·early Christianity·Elaine Pagels·Gnostic·Nicene·Revelations
Incredibly, there are three articles over at HuffPo Religion that I have recently bookmarked for brief discussion here. There are of course about ten others which reflect the liberal, progressive, ecumenical, and mystical view of religion adhered to by a tiny minority of people, and which will be of interest mostly to the highly educated [...]
Tags:Buddhist history·Christianity as state religion·Constantine·Constantine's conversion·Darwinism and the Moral Argument for God·Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche·early Christianity·empire·evolved morality·foragers·Fran de Waal·hunter-gatherers·Is Buddhism a Religion·Marc Hauser·Michael Ruse·moral code·morality·natural morality·non-religious morality·Paul Wagler·primates·privatization of religious belief·proto-morality·Rodney Stark·secular·Siddhartha·Talal Asad·westernized Buddhism
When attempting to determine whether something is “natural ” (vis-a-vis yesterday’s post on Catholicism and homosexuality) one good way of investigating the issue is to use the genealogical method. So far as I can tell, there are no hunter-gatherer or pre-Neolithic societies that had taboos against homosexuality. We can therefore trace the history of the [...]
Tags:Assyria·Assyrian Empire·Aztec sacrifice·Babylolian captivity·Catholicism·Christians·demographics·demography·early Christianity·Egyptian captivity·fertility·group size·Hebrews·homosexuality·India's sacred cow·Jewish diaspora·Jews·Judaism·Levant·Lost Tribes of Judah·marriage·Marvin Harris·Mesopotamia·Michael Harner·Mormons·natural law·persecution·pork eating proscription·procreation·prohibition against homosexuality·Ralph Tanner·ritual regulations·same-sex preference·sin of sodomy·slavery·sodomy·taboo·taboos·The Social Ecology of Religion·Vernon Reynolds·warfare
Over at HuffPo Religion, Diana Butler Bass asks: “Is Western Christianity Suffering from Spiritual Amnesia?” Her affirmative answer is simultaneously strange and naive. Most religions avoid objective histories of their origins and development for good reason: history — far more than science — corrodes religious faith.
Butler begins her article by explaining that she was teaching [...]
Tags:biblical canonization·Diana Butler Bass·early Christianity·F. Max Muller·Hans Kippenberg·History·Mormon history·philology
