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Pope Francis recently said in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and on several occasions over the last year, that Western nations are exporting an idea that gender is a choice. Pope Francis asserts that this “gender ideology” is the enemy of the family. Here the pope disappoints many in America and Europe, who hoped that he might free Catholics from the heritage of homophobia and repression of women that has been protected and promoted for millennia by the Roman Catholic Church.

The post Sex, Pope Francis, and empire appeared first on OUPblog.

From the publication of the Origin, Darwin enthusiasts have been building a kind of secular religion based on its ideas, particularly on the dark world without ultimate meaning implied by the central mechanism of natural selection.

The post Darwinism as religion: what literature tells us about evolution appeared first on OUPblog.

Outbursts of popular interest in apparitions and miracles often lead to new devotional movements which can be uncomfortable for the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, contrary to the belief that they encourage them. Visionaries represent alternative sources of authority within the Catholic community; they claim to have encountered supernatural figures and understood divine imperatives in a way that is commonly thought to transcend the theological expertise of the Church magisterium.

The post The Catholic Church and the visions of Fátima appeared first on OUPblog.

Let us start at the Vatican in Rome. St. Peter’s Basilica has a strict dress code: no skirts above the knee, no shorts, no bare shoulders, and you must wear shoes. At the entrance there are signs picturing these instructions. To some visitors this comes somewhat as a surprise. Becky Haskin, age 44, from Fort Worth, Texas, said: “The information we got was that the dress code only applied when the pope was there.”

The post What do we talk about when we talk about ‘religion’? appeared first on OUPblog.

Politicians are more than anxious over negative public opinion on the National Health Service, falling over backwards to say that the NHS is "safe in our hands." Meanwhile, the Church of England is concerned about losing "market-share," especially over conducting funerals. One way of linking these two extremely large British institutions is in terms of life-style choices.

The post The NHS and the Church of England appeared first on OUPblog.

There are many aspects of Christmas that, on reflection, make little sense. We are supposed to be secular-minded, rational and grown up in the way we apprehend the world around us. Richard Dawkins speaks for many when he draws a distinction between the ‘truth’ of scientific discourse and the ‘falsehoods’ perpetuated by religion which, as he tells us in The God Delusion, “teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding” (Dawkins 2006).

The post Why Christmas should matter to us whether we are ‘religious’ or not appeared first on OUPblog.

hy were Christian theologians in the ancient and medieval worlds so fascinated by a text whose main theme was erotic love? The very fact that the 'Song of Songs', a biblical love poem that makes no reference to God or to Israelite religion, played an important role in pre-modern Christian discourse may seem surprising to those of us in the modern world.

The post Christian theology, literary theory, and sexuality in the ‘Song of Songs’ appeared first on OUPblog.

Today is Easter Sunday for the majority of the world’s 2.4 billion Christians (most Orthodox Christians will wait until May 1st to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus). After the long penitential season of Lent, Christians are greeting each other with joyful exclamations of “He is risen,” and hearing in glad response, “He is risen indeed, hallelujah!”

The post The God-man resurrected: a philosophical problem for the Incarnation appeared first on OUPblog.

On 7 January, 2016, I asked Google, “what religion is Barack Obama”? After considering the problem for .42 seconds, Google offered more than 34 million “results.” The most obvious answer was at the top, accentuated by a rectangular border, with the large word “Muslim.” Beneath that one word read the line, “Though Obama is a practicing Christian and he was chiefly raised by his mother and her Christian parents…” Thank you, Google.

The post What religion is Barack Obama? appeared first on OUPblog.

Religious belief has been allied, for centuries, with fundamentalism and intolerance. It’s possible to have one without the other, but it requires a degree of self-criticism that is not easily acquired. When Calvin endorsed the execution of Michael Servetus in 1553, he justified his decision by appeal to the certainty of his own religious faith.

The post Religious belief, fundamentalism, and intolerance appeared first on OUPblog.

Many people assume that repentance is and always has been a substantial part of the Bible, but that was not always the case. In the following interview between Luke Drake, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Lambert, an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture, the two discuss how repentance came to be seen as a part of the Bible and the early history of repentance as a concept.

The post Repentance and the Bible: A Q&A with David Lambert appeared first on OUPblog.

'Divine command theory' is the theory that what makes something morally right is that God commands it, and what makes something morally wrong is that God forbids it. There are many objections to this theory. The four main ones are that it makes morality arbitrary, that it cannot work in a pluralistic society, that it makes morality infantile, and that it is viciously circular.

The post Does moral obligation derive from God’s command? appeared first on OUPblog.

We want to know what Shakespeare believed. It seems to us important to know. He is our most important writer, and we want to know him from the inside. People regularly tell us that they do know what he believed, though mainly by showing what his father believed, or his contemporaries believed or, more accurately, what they said they believed—by demonstrating, that is, what was possible to believe.

The post Shakespeare and Religion appeared first on OUPblog.

The OUP Philosophy team has selected Baruch Spinoza as their December Philosopher of the Month. Born in Amsterdam, Spinoza has been called the “Prince of Philosophy” due to his revelatory work in ethics, epistemology, and other fields of philosophy. His works include 'The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy', 'Theologico-Political Treatise', and his magnum opus, 'Ethics'.

The post Philosopher of the Month: Baruch Spinoza appeared first on OUPblog.

At its root, Islam is as much a Western religion as are Judaism and Christianity, having emerged from the same geographic and cultural milieu as its predecessors. For centuries we lived at a more or less comfortable distance from one another. Post-colonialism and economic globalization, and the strategic concerns that attended them, have drawn us into an ever-tighter web of inter-relations.

The post The “Greater West” and sympathetic suffering appeared first on OUPblog.

Good morning everyone,

Here is the latest in my Celtic cross series. This one is a bit more involved, not in the intricate design on the cross itself but in the background, as you can see.

As usual I created this with a pencil and paper. The color is all done by painting on a single color layer in PhotoShop. I originally sketched the concept out last year, and spent a few evenings last week working out. The last time I spent this much time drawing leaves was when I illustrated Jairo Penaranda's book "The Little Leaf" which is available here. Like most people I enjoy fall, the bright colors in the trees. I'm especially enjoying it this year as we had such a hot dry summer here. I'm very thankful for the cooler temperatures, and the rain.

I chose simple colors, and gradations of a single color for each leaf, instead of multiple colors for the leaves. After spending a few days on the drawing I don't have the time to spend making a photo realistic painting (I've never enjoyed that style myself, why not just take a picture, and save the wear and tear on your hand and wrist?). I like to keep it simple too, it appeals to me.

This is a close-up of a portion of the pencil drawing before I colorized it in PhotoShop.

Thank you again for stopping by my blog. I hope that you enjoyed what I have shared with you here, and that you have a terrific day today, God bless. --Ryan

Anglo-Saxon England may seem like a solidly monochrome Christian society from a modern perspective. And in many respects it was. The only substantial religious minority in early medieval Western Europe, the Jews, was entirely absent from England before the Norman Conquest.

The post The Anglo-Saxons and the Jews appeared first on OUPblog.

For many years – running into decades, even centuries – the idea of a fundamental opposition between believers and non-believers has anchored public discussion about religion. The metaphors are of battles: these are ‘God Wars’, with ‘zealous religionists’ mounting their defences against ‘militant atheists’.

The post Beyond the ‘God Wars’ appeared first on OUPblog.

Together with Ulysses, Abraham is the earliest culture hero in the Western world. More precisely, as Kierkegaard, who called him ‘the knight of faith,’ reminds us, he has remained, throughout the centuries, the prototype of the religious man, of the man of faith. The wandering Aramean from the Book of Genesis, who rejected his parents’ idols and native Mesopotamia to follow the call of the One God to the land of Canaan, started a saga reverberated not only in early Jewish literature, but also in the New Testament (Galatians 3: 6-8), and in early Christian literature.

The post ‘Abrahamic religions’ – From interfaith to scholarship appeared first on OUPblog.

Traditionally, the story that opens chapter three of Genesis is called The Fall. In the Christian tradition, both the name and the interpretation of the story associated with it were made canonical by Saint Augustine in the first decades of the fifth century AD, about fourteen hundred years after Genesis was written down.

The post The value of knowledge appeared first on OUPblog.

Theistic literature is full of references and allusions to a self-concealing deity. The psalm writer whose poems are included in the Hebrew Bible regularly calls out, in alternating notes of perplexity, impatience and despair, to a God whose felt presence apparently seemed frustratingly inconstant. But he or she still assumes that God is there.

The post Does ‘divine hiddenness’ belong to theists or to atheists? appeared first on OUPblog.

Howdy folks. Today's illustration is another in my Sunday Sermon Series, from this week's sermon at Hockinson Community Church. The sermon was about the prodigal son parable Jesus told and is found in Luke 15:11-32.

I have read this piece of scripture many times, and have heard at least two sermons that I recall on it. Pastor Andy's sermon had a little bit different take(as usual) than the other sermons I had heard. Andy has a terrific knowledge of life/society during Jesus times. I always knew that when the prodigal son asked for his inheritance and the freedom to leave that it was a slap in the face to his father. What I hadn't ever heard before was that it was so much more than that. In those times, and that society it would have been perfectly acceptable for the father to kill his son for the disgrace he had heaped upon him. So, his sin could have, should have, cost the prodigal son his life. But the father saw him coming and ran to him, forgave him, sacrificed the fatted calf for him, welcomed him back with open arms with no questions asked. "For this son of mine was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found." (Luke 15:24)

We suffer the same when we try to shake God off, and live for this world. But if we seek repentance God is always there, running towards us. The tag line sums up what I took from this sermon. I think we should routinely stop and look up from our busy, hectic routine. Assess our lives, our direction, what we are doing and saying(and why we are doing and saying it), and see if it aligns with God's will. It's easy to get off track in life, but it's also easy to get back on track. Just turn towards Him.

I did not have time to colorize the drawing this time. With the temperature back in the 90's this week I can spend very little time in my office. Also I have little time these days for work what with Angela, Stella and the boys and the house/chores needing my attention. I like the drawing itself, but am not one hundred percent happy with it. I was going for a more subtle expression of self realization/shock at his predicament for the prodigal son there. More of a "the fog is lifting "What the..." moment. As it is, he looks suspiciously like Marty Feldman if he stuck his finger in a light socket. That's fine because I always liked Mr. Feldman, but it wasn't what I was going for originally. But, with little to no time to rework things what you see is what you get around here these days.

As always I hope you enjoyed this drawing. I hope this post was informative to you and helps you in some way in your walk. Thank you for stopping by. God bless.--Ryan

Beginning in the early 1960s, a Calvinist scholar named Rousas John Rushdoony started a movement called "Christian Reconstruction." Rushdoony sought to develop a “biblical worldview” in which every aspect of life is governed by biblical law from the Old and New Testaments. The movement has been influential in some very conservative corners of American Christianity, especially the religious right.

The post Five unexpected areas influenced by the Christian Reconstruction appeared first on OUPblog.

Are Christians persecuted in America? For most of us this seems like a preposterous question; a question that could only be asked by someone ginning up anger with ulterior motives. No doubt some leaders do intentionally foster this persecution narrative for their own purposes, and it’s easy to dismiss the rhetoric as hyperbole or demagoguery, yet there are conservative Christians all across the country who genuinely believe they experience such persecution.

The post Persecuted Christians in America appeared first on OUPblog.

Click for Parts One, Two, Three here.

I hope you’ll take time to listen to these audio teachings, if not here, then perhaps you’ll consider downloading them and taking them with you?

What the Bible really says about Death, Judgment, Rewards, Heaven, and the Future Life on a Restored Earth. God originally planned for mankind to live on earth, and His plan, though postponed by sin, will not be thwarted – it will come to pass in the future when a new earth is created. The Christian’s Hope shows from Scripture that each Christian will be rewarded in the coming world in direct proportion to the quality of how he lives for God in this world.

Click the arrow to listen to the Hope of Israel.

A Biblical Look at “Hope”

In order to properly understand the Christian’s hope, it is important to examine the exact meaning of the word “hope.” “Hope” means “a desire for, or an expectation of, good, especially when there is some confidence of fulfillment.” It is used that way both in common English and in the Bible. However, the Bible often uses the word “hope” in another way—to refer to the special expectation of good that God has in store for each Christian in the future. This includes the “Rapture,” receiving a new, glorified body, and living forever in Paradise. Today, the ordinary use of “hope” allows for the possibility that what is hoped for will not come to pass. However, when the Bible uses the word “hope” to refer to things that God has promised, the meaning of “hope” shifts from that which has a reasonable chance of coming to pass to that which will absolutely come to pass. To be a useful anchor, hope must hold fast.