SKJ Today

Are You A Progressive…?

March 24, 2010 // No Comments »

Find out now. That’s right, if you subscribe to an idea, you must subscribe to any ideology that has ever subscribed to it as well, and to every possible negative consequence remotely implied by said ideologies when you carried to absurd extremes.

Posted in Culture, Politics, Religion, Television, Video

My Kind Of Conservative

February 4, 2010 // 2 Comments »

If the Republicans ran the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Joe Scarborough we’d have a great debate in this country, and we’d all be better for it.

Posted in Culture, Politics, Religion, Video

Theology, Daily Show Style

January 5, 2010 // No Comments »

This is off color and hilarious, vintage Stewart…

Posted in Culture, Religion, theology, Video

Sam Harris on Real Time

September 22, 2009 // No Comments »

Sam Harris on Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO.

Posted in Atheism, Religion, Video

Does “Religion” Exist?

April 1, 2009 // No Comments »

Jonathan Z. Smith on the existence of “religion”:

If we have understood the acrheological and textual record correctly, man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interraction with them. But man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. It is this act of second order, reflective imagination which must be the central preoccupation of any student of religon. That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena , of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another as religious-there is no data for religion. Religion is soley the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his formost object of study. (Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, xi.)

In other words, as far back as we can conceive human beings have fashioned gods, worshipped them, engaged in cultic practices and the like. But human being have not reified a universal concept like religion and then categorized the aforementioned activities under it. It’s interesting that modern theologians like Barth and Schmemann both consider religion to be at the heart of the Fall, namely human disintegration of God from the rest of life. This may be how the Fall plays out in modern life, but to postulate this experience as universal seems difficult to say the least.

Posted in Modernity, Religion