There is a popular story about four blind men who wanted to know what an elephant was. They stood around an elephant and the first blind man grabbed the rail. “An elephant is a thick rope,” he said. The second mam felt the elephant’s leg. “No,” he said. “The elephant is a strong pillar.” Blind Read more
University of Oxford developmental psychologist Dr. Olivera Petrovich has spent years researching a single question: Are children predisposed to belief in a transcendent being? This research, much deserving of greater exposure, intrigued me, since I have engaged atheism’s most prominent modern proponents. I chaired three of atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s debates with his Read more
Naomi Fong’s mum saw she had an interest in Christianity and bought her a beaded wooden necklace with a cross on it when she was 15 years old. At the time, living with her family in New Zealand, Naomi was a believer but unbaptised, wandering the online wilderness through “anti-Catholic” websites searching for “something more”. Read more
You know that instant alarm you feel when a loved one’s normal voice on the phone is not normal? I knew something was wrong by the way my daughter said, “Mom?” A mother’s mind races in a thousand directions at that tone. What happened? What happened was indeed tragic, horrible, unbelievable: Her friend May had Read more
The term “LGBT” was used for the first time in a Vatican document. The working document for the 2018 Synod on the Youth noted, “Some LGBT youth…wish to benefit from greater closeness and experience greater care by the Church.” Sister Monica Astorga, an Argentinian Discalced Carmelite Nun, has been working with transgender women since 2005. Read more
Young people may use digital and social media, but what we ultimately desire lies far beyond it. “Digital pastoral care” as a way to meet young people where they are remains a main topic of conversation for bishops and auditors at the Synod on the Youth. Bishops are aware that young people, many of whom Read more
More than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to them. An overwhelming majority of people say that they don’t feel comfortable speaking about faith, most of the time. During the Great Depression, the playwright Thornton Wilder remarked, “The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — Read more
In Kenya there is a common call and response: “God is good” the speaker calls out and almost reflexively the room answers, “All the time, for that is his nature.” But if God is good, all the time, why is there evil? This is one of the oldest and most persistent human questions for Christian Read more
The terms for God, in the poetic language of the prayers written for centuries, have almost always been male: Father. King. Lord. And in the Episcopal Church, the language of prayer matters. The Book of Common Prayer, the text used in every Episcopal congregation, is cherished as a core element of Episcopal identity. This week, Read more
In my head, the teacher still taps her ruler on the backboard, saying, “A noun is a naming word. A verb is a doing word.” Now I want to ask, is the word God noun or verb? Surely it has to be a verb. I suspect that God as noun is an idol of my Read more