Love Your Oppressor

Image by BottleLeaf via Flickr A little over 2,000 years ago, in a land far, far away, a child was born to a people under occupation by an oppressive foreign government.  The birth of this child would change the world and turn the power structure on its head.  This child, an infant, was so threatening to those in power that the ruler decreed that all male children under two were to be killed. When Herod...

Apophatic Theology: Does Atheism Reject Far Too Little?

In the latest edition of Religion Dispatches, Paul Wallace writes an excellent essay on Atheism and apophatic theology.  In it, Wallace claims that atheists reject far too little, instead settling for rejecting a “kind of ridiculous super-object in the sky”, a position that is far too simplistic. In this way, this category of atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc.) are simply the mirror image of...

It Takes A Village

In 1996, then First Lady Hillary Clinton wrote a book called It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. For the last 14 years, whenever someone wants to mock the Federal Government for things like, oh, school lunch nutrition standards, the phrase “it takes a village”, usually soaked in sarcasm, is used. Unless you: Homeschool your kids with your own curriculum, not bought from any...

Advent Week 3 – Joy

This week marks the third week of Advent.  It started on Sunday, Gaudette Sunday, and is typically known as “Joy week”. Joy is awfully hard to come by these days, particularly with all the bad economic news.  It’s much easier to find things to bring us down than to lift us up. Yet 2,000 years ago, a young girl, pregnant and unmarried, found joy in a situation that, in those days, was about as...

Disrespecting Elizabeth Edwards

Image by TalkMediaNews via Flickr Elizabeth Edwards, ex-wife of Sen. John Edwards, passed away this week after losing her battle with cancer.  Her final message, posted via Facebook, was a message of hope, and of gratitude, for all who touched her life. Unfortunately one blogger didn’t see it that way. Instead, he saw it as another shot by the “anti-religion” left because she didn’t...