SKJ Today

Glenn Beck, George Soros and the Undermining of our Republic, Part 2

November 20, 2010 // No Comments »

This is a must watch!….

Posted in Culture, Politics, Video

Atheists Know The Most About Religion

September 29, 2010 // No Comments »

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A recent study by the Pew Foundation shows that Mormons and Evangelical Protestants in America know the most about the Christian faith, while atheists, agnostics and Jews are the most knowledgeable about other world religions. Interesting…

Posted in Atheism, Culture

Glenn Beck Agreed With Feisal Abdul Rauf Before He Disagreed With Him

August 18, 2010 // No Comments »

Posted in Culture, Politics, Religion, Video

The Future Of Religion On Campus

June 28, 2010 // No Comments »

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Posted in Culture, Religion, Spirituality, Video

Cornel West on Real Time With Bill Maher

May 29, 2010 // No Comments »

Posted in Culture, Politics, Race, Video

Theories of Change

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David Brooks wrote a nice piece on the legacy of the British Enlightenment in today’s NY Times. Unlike their French counterparts, British Enlightenment thinkers didn’t just extol reason’s capacities, they underscored its limits. There is no greater example of the this tradition than Edmund Burke, who rejected the radical approach to social change advocated by the French.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working.

If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

Brooks sees this tension between radical and more traditional Enlightenment perspectives as playing out in our politics today:

We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

No surprise where Brooks comes down.

Posted in Culture, Modernity, Philosophy, Politics

Bill Maher’s Panel Discusses Atheism & The Role of Religion in Public Life

May 16, 2010 // No Comments »

Bill Maher’s Panel on Atheism & Religion in Public Life
Uploaded by scottkentjones. – Up-to-the minute news videos.

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Politics, Religion, Spirituality

Is Mainline Protestantism’s Decline a Sign of Success or Failure?

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The decline of Mainline Protestantism is a fact. But what does it mean? What’s at the root of it. Christian Smith offers some suggestions in Souls In Transition, at least where that decline concerns young adults.

It is old news by now that mainline-liberal Protestant denominations in the United States are suffering major declines in membership and social prestige. Sociologists have for decades been documenting a hemorrhaging of members from mainline Protestant churches. And the religious and political ascendancy of American evangelicalism since the 1970s has drawn the spotlight away from the once mainstream religious presence of the more liberal Protestant churches. What was once mainline is now regularly dubbed the “sideline”
and the “old-line.” These are not the glory days of mainline-liberal Protestantism in America. Yet many observers are so focused on membership statistics and apparent political influences that they miss an important fact: that liberal Protestantism’s organizational decline has been accompanied by and
is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that liberal Protestantism has won a decisive, larger cultural victory. In this idea, we follow the argument of the University of Massachusetts sociologist of religion N. Jay Demerath, in a perceptive but we think underappreciated journal article he published in 1995 entitled “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline of Liberal Protestantism.” Demerath’s argument is fairly simple.  “Far from representing failure,” he says, “the decline of Liberal Protestantism may actually stem from its success. It may be the painful structural consequences
of [its] wider cultural triumph. . . . Liberal Protestants have lost structurally at the micro level precisely because they won culturally at the macro level.” What Demerath means by this is that liberal Protestantism’s core values— individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the
authority of human experience—have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have diffi culty surviving. One reason for this development is that these very liberal values have a tendency to undermine organizational vitality. The strongest organizations are generally not built on individualism, diversity, autonomy, and criticism. Furthermore, having won the larger battle to shape mainstream culture, it becomes difficult  to sustain a strong rationale for maintaining distinctively liberal church organizations to continue to promote those now omnipresent values. Liberal Protestantism increasingly seems redundant to the taken-for-granted mainstream that it has helped to create. Why organize to promote what is already hegemonic?…very many mainline Protestant emerging adults simply could not care enough to talk about religion in any specific terms, but those who did in fact
usually talked like classical liberal Protestants. In short, many emerging adults would be quite comfortable with the kind of liberal faith described by the Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in 1937 as being about “a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the
ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” They simply would have no idea about the genealogy of their taken-for-granted ideas, that is, from where historically they came. On more than a few occasions, in fact, while listening to emerging adults explain their views of religion, it struck us that they might just as well be paraphrasing passages from classical liberal Protestant theologians, of whom they have no doubt actually never heard, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The likes of Adolf von Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann, and Harry Emerson Fosdick would be proud. (p.288-289)

So perhaps the reason why the Mainline loses its young is not that they don’t listen, but that they listen all too well.

Posted in Church, Culture

Should Christians Judge?

May 13, 2010 // No Comments »

Best Question 3 – Judgment and Power from Culture Making on Vimeo.

Posted in Church, Culture, theology

A Genealogy Of Atheisms

May 11, 2010 // No Comments »

One of the things I continue to appreciate about The New Republic is its serious engagement with theological issues and ideas. Today over at TNR blog Damon Linker posted a response to Kevin Drum’s reponse to David Hart’s post about the New Atheists which I excerpted here on my blog. Linker’s response is as charming and irenic as it is lucid.

He summarizes Hart’s frustrations with the New Atheists as follows:

Hart’s essay irritatedly dismissed the new atheists for two defects: First, they show no sign of confronting and wrestling with (or even understanding) the most serious philosophical arguments of the Christian theological tradition; second, they show an almost complete lack of awareness of all that was gained (culturally and morally) by the advent of Christianity and seem blithely unconcerned about what would be lost (again, culturally and morally) were it to vanish from the world.

Drum’s critique of Hart’s critique is that in the end it begs the question:

Drum responds to Hart’s efforts to highlight the positive influence of Christianity by writing that “to say merely that Christianity is comforting or practical—assuming you believe that—is hardly enough. You need to show that it’s true.” Now, this seems to be exactly what Hart was attempting to do in the very passages of his essay that Drum dismissed and mocked. But let’s leave that aside.

Linker brings out an important omission of the New Atheists that is highlighted by Hart:

What’s most disappointing is Drum’s failure to grasp the culminating point of Hart’s essay, which, as I take it, is this: the statements “godlessness is true” and “godlessness is good” are distinct propositions. And yet the new atheists invariably conflate them. But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart’s view) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that “unconditional, honest atheism is … the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible. [emphasis mine]

Linker doesn’t think that all atheism must be the tragic kind. He points out cheery skeptics like David Hume. But Hume’s atheism was cheery and rigorously developed, not superficial. And this I take as Linker’s (and he is not alone in this) frustration with the New Atheists. It is not their atheism. It is the seeming superficiality of it all, and the kind of unbounded optimism that characterized a naive and imperialistic early 20th century Protestantism (which gave birth to magazine titles like “The Christian Century”). Here again Linker says it far better than I can:

…the new atheists seem steadfastly opposed even to entertaining the possibility that there might be any trade-offs involved in breaking from a theistic view of the world. Rather than explore the complex and daunting existential challenges involved in attempting to live a life without God, the new atheists rudely insist, usually without argument, that atheism is a glorious, unambiguous benefit to mankind both individually and collectively. There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of their books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists? Or have they made a strategic choice to downplay the difficulties of godlessness on the perhaps reasonable assumption that in a country hungry for spiritual uplift the only atheism likely to make inroads is one that promises to provide just as much fulfillment as religion? Either way, the studied insouciance of the new atheists can come to seem almost comically superficial and unserious…So by all means, reject God. But please, let’s not pretend that the truth of godlessness necessarily implies its goodness. Because it doesn’t.

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Religion