It would be a safe but sad bet that someone, somewhere in the world, is killing someone else at this very moment in the name of religion or ideology. ¶ Currently, the world’s newspapers give us each day our daily read of the Sunni Muslims ferociously slaughtering Shia Muslims in Baghdad, and of Shia Muslims ferociously slaughtering Sunni Muslims in revenge. Elsewhere it might be Muslims and Hindus killing each other in Kashmir, or Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka, or Muslims and animists in Sudan. Earlier it would have been Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, and Muslims, Orthodox, and Catholics in the Balkans. … But before anyone drifts off into the well-rehearsed litany of blaming it all on religion, we should remember that modern “terror” began in France in 1789 in the name of secular Reason, killing several million in its wars and committing a near genocide in the Vendée on its first outing. Nearer our own time, close to a hundred million people were slaughtered in the twentieth century by secularist ideologies — far more than the deaths from all the religious persecutions and repression in Western history combined.
Church and state were not officially separated in France until February 21, 1795. But the overall explosion that the corrupt, coercive French establishment ignited against itself created a grand fusion of revolution and irreligion and led to a radical secularization of French public life, so that in France to be progressive still mostly means being secular and to be religious still means being viewed as reactionary. This is a key part of the French mentality that lingers to this day and bedevils the resolution of French conflicts over religion in public life, not to speak of the direction of the European Union. ¶ Astonishingly, too, Roman Catholic writers, from the popes down, who decry the militancy of French secularism today rarely acknowledge that this fierce secularism was bred and developed in direct reaction to their own earlier corruptions and has led to similar outbreaks of murderous anticlericalism elsewhere. These include the vicious Mexican repression of Catholics in the 1920s and the brutal Socialist slaughter of seven thousand priests, nuns, and bishops in Spain in 1936.
The right of religious liberty is a fundamental consequence of human nature itself and of our capacity as thinking, choosing, conscience-directed beings. … [T]his foundation in human dignity is what makes religious liberty a natural, basic, and indispensable right, independent of the decisions of any group or government. As a human right rather than a favor, religious liberty is a right to be guaranteed by the government, but it is not the government’s right to grant. ¶ Religious liberty is for all human beings, not simply liberty for the religious. It is rooted in the characteristic, natural, and inescapable human drive toward meaning and belonging. As fundamental as life itself, this “will to meaning” finds expression in ultimate beliefs, whether theistic or nontheistic, transcendent or naturalistic. Religious liberty is for atheists and secularists, too, and for all human being who assume and value meaning in their lives. … [T]here are two reason why religious liberty should rightly be seen as the first liberty. On the one hand, it comes first logically, in that it protects the inner freedom of thought, deliberation, judgment, and choice that is the source and subject of the later rights of free speech and free assembly. Though not infallible, conscience is inalienable. Thus, what we are each bound by according to the dictates of our reason and our conscience is the very deepest thing we also desire to speak of with freedom. And we further desire to gather together with other who prize those same things.
Another example of a flawed understanding of the separation of church and state is George W. Bush’s much-trumpeted but bungled policy of providing government money for what he calls “faith-based initiatives.” Predictably, this initiative was surrounded by controversy from the start and did not live up to its supporters’ hopes. At its best, it was a well-intentioned compliment to the dynamism of faith-based entrepreneurialism in the nineteenth century. The tribute was sincere and the intention laudable — to encourage the voluntarism and dynamic energy that are now recognized as the lifeblood of a healthy civil society, and to foster the little platoons and mediating institutions that are its cells. ¶ But regardless of its political and legal problems, such as the accusations of cronyism and political manipulation, the project was self-defeating as a concept because the close relationship between government and faith-based groups almost inevitably leads, first, to a growing dependency of the faith-based organization on the government, and, eventually, to the effective secularization of the faith-based group. In the words of David Kuo, President George W. Bush’s special assistant for faith-based initiatives, “Between Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services alone, for example, more than $1.5 billion went to faith-based groups every year. But their activity had come at a spiritual cost. They were, as organizations, largely secular.”
The idea that science is just one more way of knowing the world and that there are other, radically different, yet equally valid ways, has taken deep root in academia. In Fear of Knowledge, Paul Boghossian tears these relativist theories of knowledge to shreds. He argues forcefully for the intuitive, common-sense view — that the world exists independent of human opinion and that there is a way to arrive at beliefs about the world that are objectively reasonable to anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence, regardless of their social or cultural perspective. This short, lucid, witty book shows that philosophy provides rock-solid support for common sense against the relativists; it is provocative reading throughout the discipline and beyond. ~ Product Description
An Apology for Apologetics argues that a vigorous apologetics is a vital component of any sound effort at interreligious dialogue. Griffiths shows that a spirited defense of each religious tradition must be made by people who are both committed to their “truth” and open to serious criticisms by members of other faith traditions. He demonstrates why and how such a recognition of the necessity of interreligious apologetics (the “NOIA principle”) runs counter to the underlying presuppositions of many proponents of interreligious dialogue. Griffiths raises the specter of an unacceptable price that will be paid if the apologetic enterprise is abandoned. Religious traditions, he shows convincingly, will face relegation to the realm of purely private opinion and religious people will be denied the minimum plausibility they need to engage in public discourse. He argues ultimately that if basic doctrines cannot be defended against alien claims, religious tradition cannot survive. This book will without a doubt stimulate the debate it seeks to introduce: it unapologetically issues a challenge to teacup ecumenists and lazy pluralists. An Apology for Apologetics is for all who are seriously concerned with their own religious communities. It shows how to think about (and communicate with) those whose practices and convictions seem to differ significantly from one’s own.
From Abelard to Zwingli, the history of Christian biblical interpretation has been shaped by great thinkers who delved deeply into the structure and meaning of Christianity’s sacred texts. With over two hundred in-depth articles, the Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters introduces readers to the principal players in that history: their historical and intellectual contexts, their primary works, their interpretive principles and their broader historical significance. In addition, six major essays offer an overview of the history of biblical interpretation from the second century to the present. This one-volume reference by Donald K. McKim, a revised and vastly expanded edition of IVP Academic’s Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, will serve as an invaluable tool for any serious student of the Bible and the history of biblical interpretation. "The articles are full enough to be informative but not so detailed or technical as to be beyond the reach of the undergraduate reader. Together with the survey articles on specific periods, this collection of over two hundred articles on individual scholars offers an unrivaled overview of the history of biblical scholarship in all of its developments and vicissitudes. It is not only a valuable resource for the student; it is also intensely interesting." ~ I. Howard Marshall
Loving Wisdom is a book that’s difficult to summarize, and I gather that was intentional. In groundbeaking fashion, Christian apologist and philosopher Paul Copan has written an extraordinarily wide-ranging book that’s exhaustive enough to serve as a textbook on many subjects within apologetics and philosophy of religion, but concise enough to serve as “a kind of launching pad” to further exploration. This is one of the densest books I’ve ever read — dense in ideas not words! The author can cover a remarkable amount of ground in a relatively few pages. Coming to it as a layman, I found it readable and accessible — even when comprehension of difficult concepts proved elusive. Although a serious and scholarly treatment of serious topics, Loving Wisdom is never ponderous, mainly because Copan’s writing is suffused with good humor and wit. What also comes through is his charitable and fair treatment of opposing viewpoints.
[P]ostmodernism leads to the institutionalization of anger. Postmodernists are preoccupied with power struggles that surround language use and social practice, and they see themselves as part of a missionary movement to liberate powerless, oppressed victims from dominance. They often practice a "hermeneutics of suspicion" in which they interpret body language, speech, and written communication not in terms of the communicators’ own intentions but in terms of their attempt to victimize and dominate "the other" as understood according to the postmodernists’ interpretive agenda (e.g. feminism, gay rights, and so forth). To be sure, power issues are a legitimate aspect of language, though one hardly needs postmodernism to see this. But by making power struggles and victimization a central focus of the postmodern crusade, the movement dignifies anger by institutionalizing it and placing it on ideological high ground, and it creates anger by fostering relational suspicion according to which there is a victimizer under every linguistic tree.
Put simply, postmodernism is self-refuting. Postmodernists appear to claim that their own assertions about the modern era, about how language and consciousness work, and so forth are true and rational; and they write literary texts and protest when people misinterpret the authorial intent in their own writings. In these and other ways postmodernism seems to be self-refuting. ¶ Sometimes postmodernists respond by denying that they take their own assertions and writing to be true, rational, constituted by their own authorial intent, and so forth. If these claims are correct, then they would, indeed, save postmodernism from self-refutation. But this response must be rejected. When one actually reads carefully postmodernist writings, it is hard to avoid the impression that they do, indeed, present themselves as true, rational, and so on. In this sense, though on the defensive, postmodernists may deny that their writings exhibit these features; nevertheless an examination of those writings seems to undermine those denials.