But this is exactly the wrong way to look at the problem. What you really want to know—what the argument was originally about—is why, at certain points in human history, large groups of people were slaughtered and tortured, ostensibly in the name of an idea. Redefining a word won’t change the facts of history one way or the other. Communism was a c

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A searing example from religious history is the story of Giordano Bruno, an Italian free-thinker who anticipated many of the ideas of modern science, and in the process clearly contradicted a literalist reading of the creation narrative in the Bible. Arrested by the secret police of the Roman Catholic Church, known as the ‘Holy Office’, he was put

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I’m going to be as blunt as possible: Language like Metaxas’s, like the Texas GOP’s, and like some of the statements you’ll read below embody a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence. There isn’t a theological defense for it. Indeed, its fury and slander directly contradict biblical commands. When core biblical values are contingent, b

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It is precisely because we have a natural desire for the supernatural, as Henri de Lubac put it, that this arc of human hunger is prone to warping, tempted to find its rest in god-like substitutes like power, or parodies of religion like the military, or even the belonging one finds in a narco-gang, as if it were a sorry shadow of the civitas Dei.

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