Dr Paul Allen

Stained glass window, U. S. Pentagon, honoring the Four Chaplains, USAT Dorchester, 1943 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) A colleague forwarded me a  news article  awhile back written by James Dao of  The New York Times . My friend kept his own comments brief. "This is not a parody," he wrote. I was intrigued. After all, this was the Times , not the  Onion , why would he need to qualify it in that manner? The piece was titled, "Atheists Seek Chaplain Role in the Military." I quickly understood the context of my friend's note. "Strange as it sounds," Dao wrote, "groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy , hoping to give voice to what they say is a large—and largely underground—population of nonbelievers in the military." Existing chaplains are generally opposed to the idea, for obvious reasons. If atheism is the absence of religious belief , why would they want som...

Image via Wikipedia I have just ordered my copy of "The Unintended Reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society" by Brad Gregory. Before the Protestant Reformation , Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West .  Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief ; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile lib...