Mormons in the Mythical Mainstream
The problematic “m” word in this week’s question is not “Mormonism” but “mainstream”: If you tell me where the mainstream is, I’ll tell you if the Mormons are in it.
Interfaith Issues Archives
May 7, 2007 7:20 AM
Comments (100)May 28, 2007 9:20 AM
The Mutual Dream
Surely not only religion but all gods are made by humans, imagined by humans. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes was right when he said, "If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses.” But at the same time, humans may be god-made in the sense of imagined by the gods; perhaps horses were conceived by gods in the form of horses.
June 28, 2007 9:32 AM
Hell is Other People; Heaven is Other Dogs
“Are there dogs in heaven?” someone once asked Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of several wonderful books celebrating the pleasures of life with dogs. “Of course,” she replied; “otherwise, it wouldn’t be heaven.” And she’s right.
July 12, 2007 8:26 AM
Super-Titles for the Kingdom of Heaven
The controversy about the Latin Mass involves two very different issues, form and content. Both of them could be solved by the judicious use of super-titles.
September 6, 2007 11:30 AM
Letting God Off the Hook
In our culture, disasters such as Katrina and 9/11 are often the occasion on which we confront the problem of evil publicly together, though of course as individuals we bump into it every day, and theologians have broken their heads over it 24/7 for thousands of years.
After the desperate scramble for survival, for shelter, water, food, after searching for the living and then searching for the dead, it is time to bury the dead and to grieve, and that is always a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson's phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully. Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews, have approached the problem of evil with monotheistic blinders and fallen into the trap of the four-fold paradigm: God is good (or merciful), God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful, and there is evil. How could God do this to us? (Woody Allen, a much under-rated theologian, came up with the best answer to these questions, I think: God is not evil, he’s just an underachiever.)
But Hinduism, the religion I know best, is not hobbled by monotheism, and therefore most Hindus do not assume that their god is merciful, or all-knowing, or all-powerful, though they are well aware of the existence of evil, which they formulate in a more basic and existential, rather than monotheistic, way. The question then becomes, not, How could God do this to us? but How can this happen to us? Why us?
