By: Jay Forseth on April 3, 2018
Our small town in Columbus, Montana has a population of 1800, with about 25% of souls attending church on a Sunday morning (nearly 50% attend on Christmas and Easter). We have more dogs/cats than addresses. There are 9 churches in our town, with nearly the same number of casinos. More people attend our Friday night…
By: Chris Pritchett on April 3, 2018
In his book, “The Righteous Mind,” Jonathan Haidt offers his findings in moral psychology that seek to explain why some people are “liberals” while others are “conservative.” Or to put it another way, “Why is everyone who disagrees with me so stupid?” According to Haidt, it is not because some of us used pure reason…
By: Jason Turbeville on March 31, 2018
In writing his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion Johnathan Haidt dismisses the old cliche, “It is not polite to discuss politics and religion”. In bringing these two topics to the forum he asks a very good question. Why are people so divided by these two topics? It does…
By: Mike on March 30, 2018
Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion is a frustrating read for people who are unwilling to consider radically opposing points of view. The Righteous Mind is an evolutionary biased book that says humans have “primate minds with a hivish overlay” and that life is simply a game.…
By: Kyle Chalko on March 29, 2018
Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind lays forth a convincing argument for why people choose emotional heart decision or judgments, and then quickly use their head and reasoning to back up what they’ve already decided. This has been written about before within other topics such as Emotional Intelligence and Begin with Why, but Haidt applies…
By: Trisha Welstad on March 24, 2018
In Bad Religion, Ross Douthat has written a fascinating version of what’s gone wrong in American religion over the last seventy years. He reveals through an historic account, the drift of the Christian church from the doctrinal pillars it once knew to pop versions of spirituality primarily outside the walls of church buildings. Of course…
By: Jason Turbeville on March 24, 2018
I was extremely interested in getting to Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics for one reason, I agree with him. A little about me first, I grew up going to many different churches, Methodist, Episcopalian, Non Denominational, and Baptist, and the one thing I remember about religion growing up was,…
By: Kyle Chalko on March 24, 2018
Ross Douthat in His book Bad Religion[1] clearly informs us of how America has become, as the subtitle says, a nation of heretics. Douthat walks us through American history, explaining how Going America started with an overwhelmingly Christian background, and experienced two great revivals and saw God in many places along the way, and yet…
By: Greg on March 23, 2018
“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” said Pat Robertson. He also said, “Many of those people involved in Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many were homosexuals –…
By: Mark Petersen on March 22, 2018
Ross Douthat’s book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, brings further context to this semester’s focus on how we’ve arrived here – a postmodern, disconnected, do-it-yourself faith constructed in our own image – a heretical, even shameful, deviation from orthodoxy. Begin with Bebbington’s foundational review on British evangelicalism, continue with Weber’s Protestant…
By: Christal Jenkins Tanks on March 22, 2018
“I concentrate on a new goal: reclaiming the word love. My goal is to explore how Christ’s love manifests itself in believer’s lives, and in turn, how to best express that love to the rest.”[1] These are the words of author Andrew Marin in his book Love is an Orientation. Marin who identifies as a…
By: Jean Ollis on March 22, 2018
Ross Douthat, a Catholic convert at 17, writes the compelling text Bad Religion, How We Became a Nation of Heretics (heretics defined as a person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted) in which he challenges the reader to feel safe and empowered to be political without being partisan. Much like author…
By: Dan Kreiss on March 22, 2018
Realizing now that I live in a nation of heretics fills me with mixed emotions. On the one hand I feel at home, recognizing that there are certainly aspects of my own faith expression that are heretical to orthodox Christianity, whether or not I know what they are. On the other hand, there is a…
By: Stu Cocanougher on March 22, 2018
When I picked up the book Love in an Orientation this week, I had already had a lot of history with this work. Not only had I read the book several years ago, I have heard Andrew Marin, the author, speak twice. Once in front of about 3,000 youth workers and once in a…
By: Chip Stapleton on March 22, 2018
Amazon, for all of it’s faults, is a pretty amazing and useful website (somehow that title doesn’t do justice to what Amazon is… but I digress). For instance, when I went to the Amazon.com page for this week’s assigned reading, Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community by Andrew Marin, there was a little grew…
By: Chris Pritchett on March 22, 2018
Douthat’s thesis from 2012 is that institutional Christianity in the United States is in decline, but the United States remains a nation where the majority of the population still claims belief in God. Many of these so-called believers may be church-goers in congregations that are somewhat disconnected from church history. Others are disconnected from any…
By: Jennifer Williamson on March 22, 2018
“It’s like a tightrope,” David said. “What do you mean?” our son asked. It was late at night, but our eight-year old boy was wrestling with deep theological issues, and rather than feeling hassled or harried by these late night forays into questions about biblical contradictions, my husband secretly enjoyed the mental exercise of trying…
By: Katy Drage Lines on March 22, 2018
The Last Time The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant with white tablecloths, he leaned forward and took my two hands in his hands and said, I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that. And I said, I think I do know. And he said, What surprises me is…
By: Dave Watermulder on March 22, 2018
“The jeremiad has been one of the most durable literary forms throughout American history. Typically, the author identifies some golden age, one just now dissolving in the rearview mirror; recounts the slippery path of declension; and then prescribes an amendment of ways in order to avert further disaster.”[1] This is the description of Ross Douthat’s…
By: Shawn Hart on March 22, 2018
“Finally, in this America the Christian view that God desires justice but that it’s wrong to expect utopia in this lifetime has given way to a more optimistic vision, in which the spread of democracy is part of the divine plan, the doctrine of American exceptionalism is a kind of Eleventh Commandment, and political leaders…
