Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60023. Televised faith healers have produced a recognisable style: the platform, the word of knowledge about a condition somewhere in the auditorium, the hand on the forehead, the person falling backwards, the announcement of a miracle, and then the appeal for a gift of faith. Millions watch. Many send money they cannot spare. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60040. Faith deconstruction has become the standard word for what happens when a believer starts pulling their inherited Christianity apart to see what, if anything, holds. It is worth noticing that the church has a much older word for a similar process, and that word is reformation. The two are not the same, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60007. What about other religions is rarely a neutral enquiry. Behind it usually stands a colleague, a neighbour, a daughter in law, somebody sincere and kind who believes something else, and the real question is whether I am prepared to say that person is wrong. So let me answer it honestly and without the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60022. The resurrection of Jesus is not one Christian belief among many. It is the claim on which everything else stands or falls, and the New Testament says so with a bluntness that always surprises people who expect religion to hedge. Paul writes that if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 60038. Religious trauma is a phrase that would have baffled my grandfather and is now common enough to have its own shelf in the bookshop. It describes the lasting harm some people carry from their experience of church, and the first thing I want to say is that the harm is often real. I…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60006. The problem of evil is the objection I take most seriously, and the one I am slowest to answer quickly. It is the argument that if God is entirely good and entirely powerful, then the suffering in this world should not exist, and since it plainly does, one of those attributes has to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60037. Moral relativism arrived with a promise of peace. If there is no truth binding on everyone, the argument went, then nobody can impose anything on anybody, and we shall all live together in easy tolerance. That was the sales pitch. Anybody who has watched a public disagreement in recent years knows that the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60005. Dragons in Scripture turn up more often than most readers realise, and the question of whether anything real stands behind them is not as silly as it sounds. Every continent has dragon stories, and cultures with no contact produced descriptions with striking family resemblances. I am going to take the question seriously without…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60021. Scientology is one of the most recognised new religions in the world and one of the least understood, which is not an accident. Most people know the celebrities, the litigation and the shopfronts on the high street offering a free personality test, and very little else. What the organisation teaches at its higher…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60036. Expressive individualism is the water our culture swims in, and like all water it is hardest to notice when you are soaked in it. It is the conviction that each of us carries an authentic inner self, that the highest good is to discover and express that self, and that anything which restrains…