Margaret Atwood on Christianity, The Handmaid’s Tale, and What Faithful Activism Looks Like Today: This detailed interview with the author whose novel has received renewed interest may offer students a way to consider how religion and theological themes are treated in literature. The teacher could easily assemble a course around this and other selected novels […]
Why Does the Bible Require New Mothers to Atone after Childbirth? — Leviticus 12-13 says that when a woman gives birth, she is impure for several weeks, after which she must offer two distinct sacrifices: an “olah,” or burnt offering, and a “ḥatat,” or sin offering. This article offers some different views on the text. How might […]
What’s It Like To Be A Squirrel? This brief update (including a great 2 min video of a squirrel with a GoPro!) on Thomas Nagel’s famous essay on consciousness can introduce students to the problem of consciousness, subjectivism, objectivism, and the difficulties of arriving at a common baseline for reality. Students in apologetics should be […]
Reinhold Niebuhr, Washington’s Favorite Theologian: This not entirely sympathetic essay on Reinhold Niebuhr can introduce students to an important modern theologian and to themes in modern world affairs and theology. We may find reasons to agree, disagree, and probe further into this essayist’s views: Individuals were capable of overcoming sin, he [Niebuhr] argued, but groups were […]
Why Religion Is More Durable Than We Thought In Modern Society: (See also the Pew study) Check both the audio and the text versions of this NPR coverage of the Pew data on religion and more education. The new consensus of sociologists and demographers is that modernization and secularization are indeed related, but in complex ways. A […]
