Check out an experience of mine and discover whether you too find it delightfully therapeutic. Sit in for an hour on a Civil War history class with Dr. David Blight of Yale University. It’s free. All twenty-seven lectures of a course Blight taught on The Civil War and Reconstruction in 2008 are available on the... Continue Reading →
Eight Proposals to Encourage Human Agency
In a recent blog essay entitled God and War, two proposals were advanced to get God out of the war business. These proposals join six others in the book Abdication: God Steps Down for Good to form a program directed at this same goal. In the interest of complete information and full understanding, the eight... Continue Reading →
Graceland: Barack Obama’s Third Inaugural
President Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney—massacred Pastor of Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina—was one of the finest I’ve heard, and deserves standing among the most important speeches in our history. Think about his problem for a moment. What could he say to the wife, daughters, extended family, colleagues, and co-religionists of a Pastor... Continue Reading →
Awkward Allies: Religion and Science
In an earlier blog essay, Religion and the Credibility of Science, I argued that religion and science are fundamentally opposed to each other. In the book Abdication: God Steps Down for Good, I make the same claim, but with a twist, namely that the two, while antagonistic, are also allies of one another! How can that... Continue Reading →
God and War
If you happen to be asking: what in God’s name is Will doing in his recent blog entries, I’m highlighting claims in Abdication: God Steps Down for Good that appear to have been overlooked by its readers and commentators, probably because of the “abdication of God” idea featured in its title. A new reader can... Continue Reading →
Belief in God
In a previous entry (Planetary Crisis: Two Fundamental Assumptions), I explained that Abdication: God Steps Down for Good is fundamentally an anti-war/planet-livability story, a fact that most readers of the book have overlooked due perhaps to the inclusion of the word God in the title. In this followup entry, I explain that God is not... Continue Reading →
Divining Nature
I was brought up a Christian, in the American Baptist tradition, baptized by my father, the minister of the churches I attended until I left the church for good after high school. I had mentally absconded well before that, however, starting around the age of six, because—I secretly told myself—these parishioners weren’t hearing what my... Continue Reading →
Iraq War: Out With a Whisper
Earlier this month, Edward Wasserman, Knight Foundation Professor of Journalism at Washington and Lee University and writer for the McClatchy Newspapers, published the most important piece of analysis I have read in the New Year. The article appeared in the Maine Sunday Telegram under the evocative heading, Media AWOl in Exposing Iraq War's Many Follies.... Continue Reading →