Featured Series

Sometimes I want to explore a topic in depth, so I organize the posts on that topic into a linked sequence.  Every featured sequence has its own index page, which lists all posts in the series.  You can click on any of the series below to see its index page or browse all index pages here.

• Loving Parishioners in their Particularity (Oct ’14) – How can the church do a better job acknowledging, welcoming, and supporting marginalized/isolated parishioners (including single moms, people with depression, parents with small children, etc)?

• Nice Guys and Casual Dates (Sept ’14) – Addressing confusion and resentment caused by our low-intimacy culture

• Sondheim Symposium II: Friendship (July ’14) – Using Merrily We Roll Along and The Four Loves to spark a conversation on friendship

• Pope Francis Bookclub (2014) – Reading through Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus, one meditation per week

• The Inspector Javert Medley (Dec ’12) – What I had to give up to be a daughter in Christ instead of a sister to Javert

• Singing my way to the Sacraments (Nov ’12) – In the three days before my baptism, some spiritual meditations sparked by Broadway musicals.

• Reading Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (Nov ’12) – Reading and blogging through New Atheist Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (plus some crosstalk with one of Patheos’s atheist bloggers)

• Cultivating Curiosity (Sept ’12)  – Some meditations on how to get in a better frame of mind for arguments and exploring new ideas (by LARPing)

• Sondheim Symposium (Aug ’12) – After watching Company and Passion, several guest posters and I try and thrash out the problems of love and marriage.  How do you figure out who to be vulnerable to?  (Plus some thoughts on the role of the grotesque as a pointer to truth).

• Offering Loving Resistance (July ’12) – Reviewing a conscientious objector’s memoir sparks a conversation about martyrdom, courage, and whether Hamlet is the worst person in Hamlet.

• Rationalist Summer Camp (July ’12) – In which I spend a week at a Center for Applied Rationality workshop

• Second Annual Ideological Turing Test (June ’12) – Once again, atheists and Christians try to pretend to be each other, to test how well they understand the other side.  Last year’s prompts focused more on standards of evidence; this year’s looked at aesthetics and authority.  Plus, behind the scenes explanation of strategy from contestants

• Reason Rally/American Atheist National Conference (Mar ’12) – A time to come together and pick (hopefully productive) fights with everyone on my team!

• Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition (Jan ’12) – Parsing Plato, Aristotle, and Thomism with the help of some friendly Dominicans.

• To take up arms against a sea of sexists (Jul ’11) – Talking tactics in the war on sexism

• Guestblogging at Daylight Atheism (May ’11) – When Adam Lee went on vacation, I stepped in and wrote a series of posts on atheist tactics and the value of mockery.

• Ex-Gays and Debating Mores (Apr ’11) – A visit from a campus preacher sparks a controversy and some thoughts on appropriate ways to make controversial arguments as well as some discussion of sexual ethics.

• Defining Atheism, Defining Sacrilege (Feb ’11) – A discussion about P.Z. Myers turns into an argument about when, if ever, blasphemy is an appropriate form of protest.

• An Attraction to Orthodoxy (Feb ’11) – What should an atheist do when some Christian metaphysics start ringing true?

• Why I Like Covenant Marriage (Jan ’11) – Making a pitch to atheists on the value of covenant marriage

• Identifying Purposefulness (Jan ’11) – Three guest posters and I try to figure out how one could discern purposefulness in the natural world

• Can There be an Atheist Agenda? (Nov ’10) – After getting into a dispute with another atheist blogger, some consideration of what Atheists hold in common

• Eight Questions for Atheists (Oct ’10) – Taking on the Discovery Institute’s challenge

• Sin and Immorality (Oct ’10) – Where my understanding of sin overlaps and diverges from Christian thought

• Why I Don’t Believe (Sept. ’10) – Three questions for anyone trying to convert me

• A Religion I Like (Sept. ’10) – An attempt to give a portrait of the kind of religion I would believe in, by discussing the only one to which I ever tried to convert

• Math and Morality (Aug. ’10) — An explanations of the underpinnings of my epistemology and my ethics. Starts with Flatland and topology and proceeds on through game theory and theory of vision (and, yes, I promise it all has to do with absolute morality)

• Granny Weatherwax and Discworld (Jul. ’10) — Casting about for a way to introduce and explain my philosophy on the new blog, I decide to channel one of the fictional characters who most shaped my thinking: Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax.

• Debate with Justin Martyr (Jun ’10) – A Christian blogger and I have a structured debate on “R: The Evidence Supports the Existence of God.”  Back then, I took the neg.