Religion

On Gaia’s Good Side

By Justin Katz | January 20, 2008 |

One hopes that most devout Christians — Catholics especially — have a wave of initial suspicion upon hearing such admonitions as “if we only care about heaven, then we’ve lost Jesus’ sense of urgency about loving your neighbor. We’re all kin, so my neighbor is also the polar bear and the bumblebee.” It is wise,…

How Do They Not Believe…

By Justin Katz | January 6, 2008 |

Michael Novak counts the ways. It seems to me that he misses one category of atheists, or at least that he ought to have teased it out from the six that he lists: those who’ve made science and rationality (more correctly: rationalism) their god. He’s got good advice for believers, though: Recall that in your…

Be Not Afraid

By Justin Katz | December 24, 2007 |

Accusations have been made — recently and in the past — that I hold the social views that I do out of fear and hate. “Why do you fear sex?” “Why do you hate homosexuals?” “Why are you afraid of progress?” If not for the realization that these are clichés that have more to do…

Advocates for the Sheep

By Justin Katz | December 19, 2007 |

I’ve been finding something frustrating with local Christian leaders, of late. Consider part of the Gospel reading from this past Sunday’s Catholic Mass readings: Jesus said to them in reply, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead…

Romney Speech: The Public Square Cannot Be Naked

By Donald B. Hawthorne | December 6, 2007 |

The Corner provides excerpts from Mitt Romney’s speech today, which suggest it will focus on the broader strategic question of what role religion should play in the American public square instead of the granularity of Mormon theology: There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the…

The New Atheism

By Donald B. Hawthorne | October 29, 2007 |

There have a flurry of books in recent months on atheism. Writing about them in The City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple – a non-believer himself – discusses What the New Atheists Don’t See: To regret religion is to regret Western civilization: …Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of…

Outside of Everywhere

By Justin Katz | October 29, 2007 |

Not being a connoisseur of biographies, I’m finding G. Wayne Miller’s series on Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence Thomas Tobin more interesting than I expected. One result has been a new resolve to pay closer attention, and perhaps submit writing, to the diocesan newspaper, Rhode Island Catholic. That being the case, I’m not sure what…

The Mutable Soul

By Justin Katz | October 18, 2007 |

Jonah Goldberg has opened up the topic of ensoulment with respect to abortion, and an email that he published concerning the Christian view doesn’t take its conclusions quite far enough to be entirely relevant to his broader stance on abortion: What Christianity actually teaches is that man—and man alone—is a psychosomatic entity consisting of a…

Sunday’s First Page, Above the Fold, Part III: Imagine There’s No Heaven

By Justin Katz | September 17, 2007 |

The last item slipped onto the Sunday Providence Journal’s front page above the fold is the most inexplicable. Taken from the Washington Post, about atheists in England, the relevance of the article’s placement seems mainly to be that it allows the Projo to burnish its image among Rhode Island fellow travelers who accuse the paper…

Every Which Way but Truth

By Justin Katz | August 22, 2007 |

Perhaps for the sake of being clever, John Derbyshire ignores a thing that is very odd for a conservative writer to ignore. Granted, the related twofold goals of his review of Robert Spencer’s book Religion of Peace? — Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t give him a narrow context in which to work. It would…