There were two stories about the military chaplaincy in the February 8, 2011 issue of The Christian Century.  The first dealt with the disproportional representation of Evangelicals among chaplains today—33%, while the number of soldiers belonging to Evangelical churches is 3%. This situation is unlikely to change. 87% of individuals seeking to be chaplains in […]

On February 5, 2011, The New York Times carried a story about Eva Golinger, a lawyer from New York, in her thirties, who has become a fervent advocate for Hugo Chavez and his “Bolivarian revolution.” She came to Venezuela in the 1990s and now lives in Caracas, and speaks Spanish with a pronounced American accent. […]

My recent post “Virginity, Polyamory and the Limits of Pluralism” provoked more comments than any previous one. Almost all the comments latched on to a single sentence: “Once you legitimate same-sex marriage, you open the door to any number of alternatives to marriage as a union of one man and one woman,” from polygamy to […]

In its January 25, 2011 issue, The Christian Century, the banner publication of liberal Protestantism, carried an interesting cover story (subscription required) by Amy Frykholm with the title “Double Belonging”. Not only did the cover contain a graphic illustration for the article—a pair of differently colored glasses—but an editorial by John Buchanan enthusiastically endorsed the […]

In its issue of January 7, 2011, the National Catholic Reporter had an interview with Douglas Vakoch, a psychologist who is “director of interstellar message composition” at the SETI Institute (a job description prone to produce ecstasy in any teenage consumer of science-fiction). SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and is located in Mountain […]

Conservative Cassandras are turning out to be empirically correct, even if one disagrees with their philosophy: once you legitimate same-sex marriage, you open the door to any number of other alternatives to marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

I occasionally pick up The Jerusalem Post at the famous out-of-town newspaper kiosk on Harvard Square (for ongoing news about the Middle East I rely on its very informative sister publication The Jerusalem Report). In the current international edition my attention was immediately grabbed by a big advertisement on the very first page of the […]

It helps if one knows what one’s mission is in life. I am beginning to think that my mission, at least in my new life as a blogger, is to take two separate stories in The New York Times and comment on them together. In the issue of December 18, 2010 there are two stories […]

Many retail stores depend on Christmas shopping for their survival.  Economists tell us that the current uptick of this seasonal shopping is good news for the recovery from the recession. Christian clergy and secular culture critics tend to have a more sour view of these facts.The theological objection to the Christmas bonanza is neatly summed […]

From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, an unassuming and rather pedantic German scholar was at the center of passionate international debates in Protestant theology. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) was a well-known New Testament scholar. Bultmann was a professor at the University of Marburg, which was an important center for historical studies of religion and the […]