Profligation of Biblical Literacy Led to Ideological Trib...

Luther thought the result of his movement to reform the Roman Catholic Church would be what came to be called “the priesthood of all believers,” the sixteenth-century equivalent of Zuckerberg’s “global community.” In practice, the Protestant Reformation produced more than a century of bloody religious conflict. This was because new doctrines such as Luther’s, and later John Calvin’s, did not spread evenly through European populations. Although Protestantism swiftly acquired the ...

 Participating in Social Media Surrenders One's Attention

The first thing I noticed was that I suddenly lacked an outlet for the compulsion not to write.1 It wasn’t news to me that I used social media for procrastination purposes, but without it, I found myself lacking an easy source for distractions. It dawned on me that I’d mostly stopped visiting websites directly and instead had been following the recommendations in my feeds to wherever they might lead me. My reading was no longer deliberate but curated by external forces that may or may no...

 The Religious Disquiet Concerning Extraterrestrial Life

These two articles reflect some religious disquiet at the prospect of contact with ETI. When faced with an alien civilization of enormous powers and the likelihood that they are not even approximately human, the differences that divide us on Earth are likely to seem increasingly trivial and irrelevant. At least for many people, Aere should be a real decline in ethnocentrism and xenophobia and a major upsurgence of an identification with the human species and the planet Earth. Warring tribes ...