Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Interview: Daniel Radosh

Published on January 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

In Conversation with Alex Shephard on Full Stop

While visiting his wife’s family in Kansas in 2005, Daniel Radosh accompanied his sister-in-law to an evangelical Christian rock festival. At one point, one of his sister-in-law’s friends ran up to him and exclaimed, “That was awesome! They prayed like three times in a 20-minute set!” From that moment, Radosh writes in Rapture Ready, he “had to know what it meant to judge a band by how hard it prayed rather than how hard it rocked.”

Published in 2008, Rapture Ready is Radosh’s account of the “parallel universe” of Christian pop culture. Part travelogue, part investigation into the fault lines of the culture and its intersections with the mainstream, the reader follows Radosh as he attends Christian wrestling matches, alternative Christian music festivals, and Kentucky’s gargantuan Creationism Museum. While Rapture Ready may not be as well known as other excellent investigations of evangelical Christian culture, such as The Year of Living Biblically, it is the funniest and the most moving – Radosh is never cynical, always probing, and remarkably sharp.

To read more…

Church Foreclosures: Hard Times For God’s Work

Published on January 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

By Barbara Bradley Hagerty, in National Public Radio

The Lord giveth and the bank taketh away — at least, that is what a lot of churches have found recently. Lenders foreclosed on about 100 churches last year, an enormous increase from just a few years ago.

It suggests even doing God’s work does not always keep the creditors away.

For Dan Burr, the road to losing his church last year began with the greatest of hopes. Twelve years ago, Burr and his wife started to worship with a few friends in their son’s house in Fontana, Calif., a community about 80 miles East of Los Angeles. Neighbors began to come to the service. They brought their kids.

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A Philosoper of Religion Calls it Quits

Published on January 15, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

By Julia Galef, in Religion Dispatches

When philosophy professor Keith Parsons posted an announcement on his blog, The Secular Outpost, explaining why he had decided to abandon philosophy of religion, he expected only his handful of regular readers to take notice. After a decade teaching philosophy of religion at the University of Houston, during which time he founded the philosophy of religion journal Philo and published over twenty books and articles in the field, Parsons hung up his hat on September 1:

I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest… I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.

To read more…