Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 239

Islam and the West(s)

    I share here, from my notes, a passage that I liked in Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, translated by George Holoch (New York City: Columbia University Press 2007.  It is significant, given his themes, that the book’s original 2005 French title is Laïcité face à l’islam:   Islam’s encounter with the West is as […]

Jesus and the “Swoon” Theory

    One suggestion that has been offered to explain the claim of Christ’s resurrection — this was actually a popular theory among nineteenth-century skeptics and still has advocates today — holds that, although grievously wounded upon the cross, Jesus didn’t actually die.  Instead, he swooned.  People thought he was dead, though, and he was […]

What Arabs really think

    I share here a random potpourri of passages that I marked while reading James Zogby, Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us, and Why It Matters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  Jim Zogby (and his famous pollster brother, John) grew up as first-generation Americans in an Arab Catholic family:   . . . […]

Humans as “cockroaches”? One Way of Reading Scientific Naturalism

    There exists an obscure, mostly-ex-LDS-turned-atheist message board where my buffoonish and dishonest but angrily hateful depravity has been chronicled and lamented virtually every day — literally and without exaggeration, virtually every day — for the past fifteen years or so.   For no very good reason, I decided last Friday morning to visit […]

For Lena, Six Years Later

    I maintain a blog for many reasons.   One of them is purely personal:  It’s a kind of journal for me, and, even more particularly, it’s a way of remembering things, and especially of remembering people, whose memory I refuse to allow to be wholly lost.   So, for instance, I’m afraid that […]

On Monday morning’s Supreme Court ruling

    A confused world desperately craves to know where I stand on the 6-3 decision handed down this morning by the Supreme Court of the United States:   “Supreme Court rules in favor of gay and transgender workers: The justices issued a 6-3 decision Monday stating that federal employment discrimination law covers sexual orientation and […]

Reading the DNA of a single human cell

    Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011) includes the transcript of a 3 December 2008 New York City speech (“The Language of God: A Believer Looks at the Human Genome”) by the physician and geneticist Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D, who was, […]

“One night in an inconvenient hotel”

    Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011) includes, among others, a transcript of a 23 January 2003 New York City speech by the philosopher Peter Kreeft, of Boston College.   Suppose you throw God into the package.  What’s God’s answer to the […]

“The Sacred Embrace and the Sacred Handclasp in Ancient Mediterranean Religions”

    New on the website of the Interpreter Foundation, from my longtime friend and onetime missionary companion in the onetime Switzerland Zürich Mission, Professor Stephen D. Ricks:   “The Sacred Embrace and the Sacred Handclasp in Ancient Mediterranean Religions” Abstract: This article describes examples of the sacred embrace and the sacred handclasp in the […]

“It’s our glory that we can rise to the dignity of despair.”

    Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011) includes, among others, a transcript of a 23 January 2003 New York City speech by the philosopher Peter Kreeft, of Boston College.  One of the tasks that Professor Kreeft undertakes is to set forth six […]