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2020-05-15T12:35:23-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Saving the embryos: a new variation on the “trolley problem”

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

My friend David Schell has asked me (and several other prolifers he knows) to respond to the viral post describing Patrick Tomlinson’s supposedly deadly challenge to the prolife position. Several good responses have already been written, including some fine posts on David’s FB page. Here’s mine. In Tomlinson’s scenario, we have a choice between saving a five-year-old child or 1000 embryos from a fire. This is, of course, a variant of the “trolley problem,” and as in all such dilemmas,... Read more

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2020-05-15T12:35:23-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Celebrating the Reformation: a reply to Sarah Condon

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

The Episcopal priest Sarah Condon has just written a defiant blog post expressing her frustration with (male) Protestant clergy who mourn the Reformation. She gives three basic reasons (or sets of reasons) for celebrating the Reformation: 1. Women can be ordained and clergy can be married (openly and legally–she points out correctly that a large number of medieval priests lived in illicit but tacitly accepted relationships with women, and that the women involved were called “whores” and had a low... Read more

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2020-05-15T12:35:24-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

High and Low

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

High and Low is a 1963 movie by Akira Kurosawa which I saw a few days ago. It’s a modern police procedural, with the rather cliched plot of a kidnapper who taunts the father of his victim by phone and seems to have uncanny abilities to see what his target is doing. (Actually, perhaps it wasn’t cliched in 1963.) Except that the target of the extortion demand, played by Toshiro Mifune, isn’t actually the father of the victim. The kidnapper... Read more

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2020-05-15T12:35:24-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Lives of Others

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

In a key scene from the 2006 German movie The Lives of Others, the playwright Georg Dreymann plays a piece of music called Sonata for a Good Man to his girlfriend Crista-Maria Sieland, and comments, “how can anyone listen to music like this and be a bad man?” It’s a lot of weight to hang on music (admittedly haunting and effective music) composed specifically for the film by Gabriel Yare. (The original story that the film-maker, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, took... Read more

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2020-05-15T12:35:37-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Dear Protestants, Here’s Why I Didn’t Sign the Reforming Catholic Confession, and Other Dispatches From Living Among Catholics as a Protestant Priest

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Lisa

My wife said yesterday, “I’d like to post this on my blog, but it isn’t in any way about the theology of work.” I said, “You could put it on my blog.”–Edwin By Jennifer Woodruff Tait Yesterday, I got into a discussion about the Reforming Catholic Confession and why I, despite having been given an opportunity to do so, had not signed it. The reasons are several, but one of the most salient is that I am married to a... Read more

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2020-05-15T12:35:38-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

How mere Christianity made me a Catholic

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

For many years now, the main rival to Catholicism for me has been the concept of “mere Christianity” articulated by C. S. Lewis. Lewis’ most famous explanation of the subject is, of course, in his book of that name (based on radio lectures he gave to the Royal Air Force during WWII). Lewis’ articulation of basic Christian teaching has been extremely influential, but perhaps even more influential has been the very idea that there is such a thing. Lewis may,,... Read more

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2020-05-15T12:35:43-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Why we need the words “conservative” and “liberal”

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

One often hears people say that the labels “conservative” and “liberal” aren’t helpful and we should drop them. In particular, in Catholic circles it’s common for pious people to claim that the terms “conservative” and “liberal” don’t apply. Many of the folks who say this are what I would call very conservative Catholics who think that there is only one possible Catholic position on most controversial topics. There are no “conservatives” or “liberals” because that would imply two legitimate groups.... Read more

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2020-05-15T12:35:44-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“Missing out”: why helicopter parenting commodifies children

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

A friend of mine just posted on Facebook an incident in which someone berated her for “missing out on precious moments” with her child because she was checking Facebook while the child played. Now of course, in an age of social media, it is easy for parents to become absorbed with online trivialities at the expense of building a relationship with their children. But a stranger is in no position to know if a parent is doing this simply because... Read more

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2017-03-13T11:58:00-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Ben Carson is right: Slaves were immigrants

Last updated on: March 13, 2017 at 11:58 am By Edwin Woodruff Tait

William Turner, “The Slave Ship,” public domain So the Internet went up in flames last week over Ben Carson’s insertion of slaves into the American immigrant narrative in his first speech as Secretary of Housing and Human Development. Apparently, after speaking of the work ethic of immigrants in general, Carson said, “There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day... Read more

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2017-02-22T16:47:00-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Nazism and Christianity: a reply to Danusha Goska

Last updated on: February 22, 2017 at 4:47 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

John Guzlowski kindly invited me to respond to Danusha Goska’s essay on the relationship of Nazism and Christianity on his blog. You can read my response here. It’s overly long and a bit laborious due to my desire not to leave any point unanswered. Here’s the last paragraph: I don’t actually think that Danusha and I fundamentally disagree about the nature of Nazism. I think we disagree much more about how we should speak, as Christian scholars, about the role... Read more

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