Mere musings on culture, life, and theology by Samuel James
Samuel James on September 6, 2017 It's becoming common nowadays to see atheists and skeptics ridicule prayer in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Harvey. One clever meme that I've seen this time around contains a picture of an empty truck, with the caption, "Good news! Your shipment of prayers has arrived." Funny, right? Secular scoffers who speak thus usually explain…
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Samuel James on August 13, 2017 Amidst the violence and brokenness in Charlottesville, Virginia, this picture (I'm unsure of the source) has been circulating widely: There's a lot going on here, and probably nothing as striking as the image of a black police officer standing guard for the safety of a group that looks with nostalgia on the time when Americans…
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Samuel James on July 20, 2017 When a friend sent me the link to this essay by a progressive bookstore employee, whose aching moral dilemma is whether to sell a book he disagrees with politically, my response was simple. I said, "American progressive culture has become mid-1990s homeschool chain email culture." Here's what I mean by that. Growing up in a…
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Samuel James on March 2, 2017 Thomas Nagel has an erudite and punchy review of a new book by "Four Horseman" Daniel Dennett. Read the whole thing here, but here's the haymaker: I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is…
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Samuel James on January 10, 2017 One of my favorite books from 2016 was Larry Taunton's The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, which I reviewed for Mere-O. I found it to be a gripping spiritual biography of an atheist. No, the words "spiritual biography of an atheist" are not self-contradictory. Atheists have spiritual lives, whether they cop to the fact or not.…
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