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2017-02-19T14:01:00-05:00

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.

John McCain is right

Last updated on: February 19, 2017 at 2:01 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

when he warns that calling the media the “enemy” is “how dictators get started.” I hear so many people following President Trump’s lead in labeling the “mainstream media” as “fake news.” Mistrust of the media has built for a while, and Trump has fed on it and nourished it in turn. And there are good reasons to mistrust the media. They are made up of human beings as prone to error and bias as anyone else, though hopefully with training... Read more

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2017-02-18T15:55:00-05:00

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.

The Wrath of the Lamb: Why the NT is not necessarily “non-violent”

Last updated on: February 18, 2017 at 3:55 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

In comparative discussions of violence in Christianity and Islam, one often hears the argument that the New Testament specifically is non-violent, whereas the Qur’an contains many injunctions to violence. This of course has the benefit of side-stepping the difficult question of how we compare the undoubtedly violent parts of the Old Testament to the Qur’an. On the negative side, it seems to imply that the OT is irrelevant for Christians, which obviously is not the case in orthodox Christianity. (Denial of... Read more

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2017-01-14T08:22:00-05:00

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.

The Man in the High Castle: some thoughts from a reader of the book who hasn’t seen the series

Last updated on: January 14, 2017 at 8:22 am By Edwin Woodruff Tait

This article about the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle makes me want to watch the series, but also provokes some reflections on ways in which the series appears to differ from the book (which is one of my favorite sci-fi novels, indeed one of my favorite modern novels period). 1. In the book, the metaphysical speculations about alternative reality are front and center. The book does not feel, to me at least, primarily about “what would the... Read more

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2017-01-08T16:44:00-05:00

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.

Uncircumcised in heart and ears: St. Stephen’s Practical Guide to Making Yourself Obnoxious and Disliked

Last updated on: January 8, 2017 at 4:44 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

The 1979 Episcopal BCP’s lectionary reading for today excerpts St. Stephen’s long sermon in Acts 7 so as to read: “Then the high priest asked him, ‘Are these things so?’ And Stephen replied, ‘Brothers and fathers, listen to me. You are forever resisting the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do.” This misses out the long historical summary in which Stephen details all the ways in which the ancient Israelites had resisted the Holy Spirit, culminating in the... Read more

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2016-12-26T00:07:00-05:00

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.

No place for sadness

Last updated on: December 26, 2016 at 12:07 am By Edwin Woodruff Tait

Rince Priebus got himself in trouble today by sending out a message referring to “the good news of a new King,” which many people thought was a comparison of Trump to Jesus. The RNC denies this, and perhaps the people who got upset really were reading too much into a simple Christmas message. What matters is that when we celebrate the birth of Jesus we are, in fact, celebrating the “good news of a new King”–a king whose kingdom remains... Read more

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2016-12-24T15:18:00-05:00

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.

Guest post for a friend on the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Last updated on: December 24, 2016 at 3:18 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

Check out this piece I wrote for my friend Joe Martyn Ricke’s website, a meditation on the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Read more

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2016-12-24T15:14:00-05:00

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.

Advent in Jerusalem

Last updated on: December 24, 2016 at 3:14 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

I ate lunch in Jerusalem twice this Advent. Not, alas, Jerusalem the city, but Jerusalem the excellent new Middle Eastern restaurant in my town, right up the road from the other Middle Eastern restaurant, which is called Babylon. So you can walk from Jerusalem to Babylon in about two minutes. Babylon is owned by an Iraqi, and Jerusalem by a Palestinian. I like them both, but I’m coming to like Jerusalem better. It may just be the cult of the... Read more

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2016-12-15T15:14:00-05:00

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.

Am I a conservative?

Last updated on: December 15, 2016 at 3:14 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

In a Facebook conversation a while ago, somebody linked to this 2012 piece by Conor Friedersdorf listing 21 things that Americans sometimes mean by the word “conservatism.” It’s a helpful checklist for me, because I think of myself as a conservative more often than not, but often don’t fit other people’s definition of one. So here’s how I stack up against Friedersdorf’s list: An aversion to rapid change; a belief that tradition and prevailing social norms often contain within them... Read more

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2016-12-12T20:02:00-05:00

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.

Donald Trump and the triumph of right-wing postmodernism

Last updated on: December 12, 2016 at 8:02 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

When I was in grad school, involved in the graduate chapter of InterVarsity at Duke, we spent a lot of our time worry about how Christians should respond to “postmodernism.” 20th-century evangelicalism had invested itself pretty heavily in a kind of Enlightenment rationalism, and in the 90s many evangelical intellectuals were realizing that it was time for a course correction. And Duke in the 90s was a center of postmodernism. You couldn’t walk down the corridor without hearing someone say... Read more

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2016-11-15T09:25:00-05:00

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.

For the President-Elect: A Hallelujah

Last updated on: November 15, 2016 at 9:25 am By Edwin Woodruff Tait

They say there was a secret chord That Leonard played, and it pleased the Lord, But you don’t really care for music, do you?Well, now that your election’s won,You can play your games and have your fun,While all the righteous sing their hallelujah. You saw her standing in the waves, A beckoning torch for broken slaves, You saw her, and you knew she saw right through you. So you tied the Lady to a chair, You pared her nails and... Read more

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