First of all, welcome to the new blog subscribers from the annual Emerging Scholars Network member survey! Thank you for completing the survey and letting us know how ESN can improve. If you haven't been reading the blog regularly, you might want to review our new Top Posts page to get a feel for what we cover. Tom Grosh and I view the blog as an online community of ESN members, so I look forward to reading your comments and contributions. A couple of friends tipped me off to this intriguing story in the New York … [Read more...] about Would you major in Secularism?
atheism
Is Naturalism Losing Steam?
Last week, Tom and I attended the national staff meetings for InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries, which continued the theme of Campuses Renewed from our national staff conference in January. Our speakers could not have been better: historian George Marsden, the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, who wrote the seminal book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (see our online book discussion for more details), and University of Cincinnati Provost Santa Ono, who … [Read more...] about Is Naturalism Losing Steam?
Three Concerns about Anti-Christian Rhetoric
Last week, I asked how you handle anti-Christian rhetoric. This week, let me share my three concerns about verbal attacks on Christianity —specifically, those that come from academic scientists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. Spiritual/Theological: I'm currently reading Richard Mouw's Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World (InterVarsity Press, Revised and Expanded, 2010), in which Mouw calls for Christians to exhibit a "convicted civility" that honors justice, truth, and the divine image in … [Read more...] about Three Concerns about Anti-Christian Rhetoric
Poll: How Do You Respond to Anti-Christian Rhetoric?
There's a poll at the bottom of this post. Take a second to leave your answer to this question, or elaborate in the comments: How do you respond to anti-Christian rhetoric? Here's why this question is on my mind. Last week, I read several encouraging articles about the relationship between science and religion. First, I saw the AP's followup interview with Martin Gaskell, the Christian astronomer who settled a religious discrimination lawsuit against the University of Kentucky. Though most of the article focused … [Read more...] about Poll: How Do You Respond to Anti-Christian Rhetoric?
What’s the Point of Christianity?
[Ed. note: Tom has a very busy week, so Mike is filling in with a second post.] Last Friday, the Chronicle Review published an article by Stephen T. Asma called "The New Atheists' Narrow Worldview" (subscription probably required). The title intrigued me greatly, though the article itself was not quite what I expected. Asma argues that the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al.) focus too much on arguments against Christianity and fail to engage non-Western religions, especially animism. That's probably true. … [Read more...] about What’s the Point of Christianity?