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What Love Explain

Christopher Beha did not return to church because someone defeated him in an argument. His path away from Christianity had been intellectually serious and personally costly. A brother’s automobile accident, his own cancer diagnosis, and repeated encounters with mortality contributed to what might be called disenchantment. The Catholicism of his childhood no longer seemed adequate to the world he had experienced. He read Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Arthur Schopenhauer, and other critics of religious belief. He stopped attending Mass. A world without God became, if not entirely consoling, at least intelligible. Then he fell in love. Luis Parrales tells Beha’s story in a recent article in The Atlantic, “What Atheism Could Not Explain.” The title is deliberately provocative. Atheists, after all, are perfectly capable of falling in love. Beha’s wife remains an atheist. Nothing in the story suggests that affection, fidelity, or moral seriousness belongs exclusively to believers. The clai...
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The Church at 250

The United States is preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There will be ceremonies, speeches, flags, fireworks, and the usual invocations of liberty. The Episcopal Church, with its long and complicated relationship to the American republic, will inevitably be part of the observance. The question is not whether the church will mark the anniversary. The question is how. An Episcopal News Service article recently posed that question through the image of a quarter. On one side is George Washington, the first president of the United States and an Episcopalian. On the other is the Rev. Pauli Murray, civil-rights lawyer, advocate for women’s equality, co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and the first Black woman ordained an Episcopal priest. It is difficult to imagine a better symbol. Washington represents the church near the center of national power. Murray represents the church being called to account by someone whom ...
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​The Medium and the Messenger

A recent article on the Southern Baptist Convention described the growing influence of religious influencers within the denomination. The immediate story concerned theology, church politics, and questions of authority. Delegates elected leaders. Debates over women’s leadership continued. Activists and online personalities appeared to wield increasing influence over the direction of the denomination. The story is written as another episode in the culture wars. American evangelicalism presented itself as a defender of ancient truths against modern culture. Yet, it has displayed an extraordinary talent for embracing new forms of communication. Revivalists mastered the printed tract. Evangelists mastered radio. Television gave rise to the televangelist. The internet produced bloggers and podcasters. Social media has produced influencers. There is nothing surprising about this. Christianity is a missionary faith. Christians have always sought ways to carry the gospel farther and faster. ...
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History, Memory, and Repentance

“America is built on the blood of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. It is not the promised land. And what it has become is the rot that has always been underneath the jingoism and nationalism.” The historian Anthea Butler’s words are deliberately unsettling. They are meant to be. Whether one agrees with every part of her diagnosis or not, the force of the statement lies in its refusal of a familiar American assumption: that our problems are recent departures from an otherwise innocent national story. Many Americans have long imagined the nation through biblical imagery. The continent became a promised land. Settlers became pilgrims. Expansion became destiny. Prosperity became evidence of blessing. The language changed over the centuries, but the structure remained remarkably consistent. America was not merely a nation. It was a nation with a providential purpose. The difficulty is that there has always been another story beneath that story. The land was already inhabited. The...
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​What We Have Learned to Admire

A pastor was explaining why Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric did not trouble him. “I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek,” he said. “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.” The statement generated predictable political reactions. Some applauded the candor. Others condemned it. Yet the most interesting thing about the remark may not be its politics but its theology. The pastor was not merely expressing support for a candidate. He was offering a vision of the world. At the center of Christianity stands a strange claim: that power is most clearly revealed not in domination but in self-giving love. Christians gather around the memory of an executed Messiah. They tell stories about martyrs, saints, and servants. They read teachings that bless the meek, commend mercy, and instruct disciples to love enemies. For two thousand years, Christians have struggled to live up to those teachings. Failure is hardly new. Wh...
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​The Exvangelical Question

The recent HuffPost article on “exvangelicals” is not especially careful sociology, but it is attentive to a real cultural and theological phenomenon. Many people who once inhabited conservative evangelical churches now describe themselves as “exvangelicals,” a term that suggests not merely a change of denomination but a kind of exodus. The article frames this largely as a response to the fusion of religion and partisan politics. While the headline overstates the case, the issue deserves attention. What is striking is that many of these former evangelicals are not rejecting Christianity because they found the gospel too demanding. Rather, they seem to be rejecting churches that no longer appeared to them to be governed by the gospel at all. American religion has always existed in proximity to political power. The churches have never floated above history untouched by economics, nationalism, race, region, or ideology. But there are moments when the relationship between religion and po...
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The New Babel

A recent Mother Jones article, “The God Complex” by Kiera Butler, examines the increasingly religious language surrounding artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley. The article’s central observation is difficult to dismiss: many of the most enthusiastic advocates of AI no longer speak about technology merely as a tool or an industry. They speak about it as destiny. The rhetoric is strikingly theological. AI will overcome scarcity. AI will cure disease. AI will solve problems beyond ordinary human comprehension. AI may even help humanity transcend mortality itself. The builders of these systems increasingly present themselves not simply as entrepreneurs, but as custodians of the human future. One need not oppose technology to recognize the religious shape of this discourse. Human beings have always wrapped technical achievement in stories of transcendence. The industrial revolution promised liberation through machinery. The atomic age promised mastery through science. The digital r...
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