An interesting debate has been started on the Jackson Sun website. The newspaper’s editorial page editor, Tom Bohs, wrote a column asking why so many conservative Christians are opposed to health care reform. He writes:

There are plenty of people who are perfectly happy with the system we have. Their argument is: Why tamper with a system that 80 percent of the people find adequate? It’s a good question. The answer is: You wouldn’t tamper with it unless you care about what happens to the other 20 percent of the people. So we are back to our basic moral dilemma. Should American citizens be entitled to adequate health care coverage with the cost borne by all?

It is interesting to me that the one group we have heard almost nothing…

Yesterday I shared about my participation with the Interfaith Youth Core’s conference on interfaith leadership. I sat on a panel with some wonderful people representing different faiths: Maha ElGenaidi from the Islamic networks Group; Rabbi Or Rose from Hebrew College, and Greg Epstein who serves as the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard. Yes, you heard that right…Harvard has a secular humanist chaplain, and they’ve had the position for over 30 years.

Last week I wrote a post about atheism having its own form of fundamentalism. It was based on a report by NPR. Well, for the sake of fairness and balance, I think it’s only right to report that there are non-fundamentalist atheists as well. Greg Epstein is a good example. During our panel discussion he advocated passionately for his…

Today I’m at Northwestern University to speak at the “Leadership for a Religiously Diverse World” conference hosted by the Interfaith Youth Core. I’ll be sitting on a panel with representatives from a number of other faiths to discuss why we believe cooperation between religions in worth the effort.

I was connected with the conference and IFYC through Eboo Patel, the president of IFYC. Eboo and I actually grew up together in Glen Ellyn, IL, and attended elementary through high school together. We lost contact after high school, but our lives took interesting parallel paths. Eboo’s parents and my father both immigrated to the US from India. And after years of exploration, Eboo came to embrace Islam and pursue issues of interfaith cooperation. I, on the other hand, committed to…

Popular “New Atheists” like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and proving to be controversial reformers among faithful atheists. In a rift that seems more reminiscent of a church schism, traditional atheists are increasingly uncomfortable with the flame-throwing rhetoric of the new atheists.

For example, Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the book God Is Not Great, told a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto, “I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.” His words were greeted with hoots of approval.

Religion is “sinister, dangerous and ridiculous,” Hitchens tells NPR, because it can prompt people to fly airplanes into buildings, and it promotes ignorance. Hitchens sees no reason to sugarcoat his position.

“If I said to a Protestant or Quaker…

The Wizard of Oz was a mighty and powerful being to be feared and respected…until the curtain was drawn back and the Wizard turned out to be a mechanical façade created by a little man pushing buttons and pulling levers. The classic story came to mind this week as I heard two separate stories of megachurch pastors literally outsourcing their Bible study and exegetical sermon preparation work.Apparently the trend is not as uncommon as one might think, although I’m sure not every large church pastor utilizes the services of outsiders. The program works like this-a megachurch pastor has limited time and many obligation. He simply cannot pour hours of labor into studying the Bible, exegeting the texts, reading commentaries, and researching historical interpretations. So, he hires a credible…

I’m in Atlanta this week for the Catalyst Conference. The blog I manage for Leadership journal, Out of Ur, is one of the official blog sites for the event. I’ll be posting regularly on the site, as will Marshall Shelley, Kevin Miller, and Drew Dyck. You can keep track of what’s happening at OutofUr.com.

If you’re at Catalyst, let me know. It’d be nice to see some friends and interact with Leadership subscribers and Urbanites.

Last week I posted an excerpt of an article by Jonny Baker from “Grace,” an alternative worship community in London, about the hunger among the young for both liturgy and tradition. There have been a number of other resources documenting this same trend. And now Samuel Freedman from the NY Times has written about the movement of Protestants toward the Orthodox Church. Here’s a bit of his article:

The visible shift began in 1987 with the conversion of nearly 2,000 evangelical Christians, led by Peter E. Gillquist and other alumni of the Dallas Theological Seminary and the Campus Crusade for Christ. More recently, a wave of converts has arrived from such mainline Protestant denominations as the Episcopalian and Lutheran.

Some 70 percent of Antiochian Orthodox priests in the United States are converts, according…

  This week I’ve been catching bits and pieces of Ken Burns’ new series on PBS: The National Parks-America’s Best Idea. I’ve loved everything Burns has produced, especially his documentary on World War II, but the National Parks combines his historic story-telling abilities with some of the most beautiful images of America’s most beautiful places. It’s a fantastic series, and I look forward to watching the entire thing on DVD.What I found most intriguing so far has been the story of John Muir-the man, perhaps more than any other, responsible for pushing the federal government to preserve large sections of wilderness. Muir, raised by a brutal Calvinist father and beaten in to memorizing the entire Bible, escaped the rigid confines of his Christian tradition to discover the beauty…

Andy Crouch has written a wonderful piece about his reflections from the recent u2 concert in Chicago. I highly recommend reading the entire post over at the Q Blog. Andy is a great writer and his description of the stage, audience, and tone of the event is the best I’ve read. But his analysis of the concert as a cultural artifact is really brilliant. Here’s a bit:

All of which makes me glad and a bit amazed that such power has fallen, in the case of U2, into such humble hands. Bono would be the first to protest that he is anything but humble, but of course that is one of the signs of humility. For all the posturing, for all the 30-foot-high closeups on the screen, after much…