Author: Glen

I recent­ly read/skimmed Stephen Prothero’s book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Reli­gions That Run the World–and Why Their Dif­fer­ences Mat­ter. Prothero is a pro­fes­sor of reli­gion at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty who was raised Epis­co­palian but has since reject­ed Chris­tian­i­ty. He now describes him­self as con­fused. Be that as it may, he makes some true but unfash­ion­able claims in his intro­duc­tion. Here are some bits I was par­tic­u­lar­ly keen on:

The book is well summed up on the inside front dust jack­et:

To claim that all reli­gions are the same is to mis­un­der­stand that each attempts to solve a dif­fer­ent human prob­lem. For exam­ple:

• Islam: the prob­lem is pride / the solu­tion is sub­mis­sion
• Chris­tian­i­ty: the prob­lem is sin / the solu­tion is sal­va­tion
• Con­fu­cian­ism: the prob­lem is chaos / the solu­tion is social order
• Bud­dhism: the prob­lem is suf­fer­ing / the solu­tion is awak­en­ing
• Judaism: the prob­lem is exile / the solu­tion is to return to God

In a sec­tion called “Aller­gic to Argu­ment” he described a frus­trat­ing real­i­ty that I see almost every day as a min­is­ter to col­lege stu­dents:

In my Boston Uni­ver­si­ty cours­es, I work hard to fos­ter respect­ful argu­ments. My stu­dents are good with “respect­ful,” but they are aller­gic to “argu­ment.” They see argu­ing as ill-man­nered, and even among friends they avoid it at any cost.… Espe­cial­ly when it comes to reli­gion, young Amer­i­cans at least are far more like­ly to say “I feel” than “I think” or (God for­bid) “I believe.” (4)

I liked this bit, too:

All too often world his­to­ry is told as if reli­gion did not mat­ter. The Span­ish con­quered New Spain for gold, and the British came to New Eng­land to catch fish. The French Rev­o­lu­tion had noth­ing to do with Catholi­cism, and the U.S. civ­il rights move­ment was a pure­ly human­i­tar­i­an endeav­or. But even if reli­gion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of reli­gion to make sense of the world. (8)

I first heard the fol­low­ing obser­va­tion from Joe Zick­afoose years ago, and the longer I reflect upon it the more con­vinced I am of its truth:

What the world’s reli­gions share is not so much a fin­ish line as a start­ing point. And where they begin is with this sim­ple obser­va­tion: some­thing is wrong with the world.… Reli­gious folk world­wide agree that some­thing has gone awry. They part com­pa­ny, how­ev­er, when it comes to stat­ing just what has gone wrong, and they diverge sharply when they move from diag­nos­ing the human prob­lem to pre­scrib­ing how to solve it. Chris­tians see sin as the prob­lem, and sal­va­tion from sin as the reli­gious goal. Bud­dhists see suf­fer­ing (which, in their tra­di­tion, is not ennobling) as the prob­lem, and lib­er­a­tion from suf­fer­ing as the reli­gious goal. (11)

And I think his four-part analy­sis is one of the more use­ful ways to sum­ma­rize reli­gions:

At the heart of this project is a sim­ple, four-part approach to the reli­gions, which I have been using for years in the class­room and at lec­tures around the world. Each reli­gion artic­u­lates:

• a prob­lem;
• a solu­tion to the prob­lem, which also serves as the reli­gious goal;
• a tech­nique (or tech­niques) for mov­ing from this prob­lem to this solu­tion; and
• an exem­plar (or exem­plars) who chart this path from prob­lem to solu­tion.

(14)

And in one of his many non-PC moments:

While in Jerusalem research­ing this book, I struck up a con­ver­sa­tion with an elder­ly Mus­lim. When I told him I was writ­ing a book on the world’s reli­gions, he looked at me stern­ly, point­ed a fin­ger in my direc­tion, and instruct­ed me to be hon­est. “Do not write false things about the reli­gions,” he said. Reli­gious Stud­ies schol­ars are rarely hon­est enough to admit this in per­son, much less in print, but we all know there are things that each of the world’s reli­gions do well, and things they do poor­ly. If you want to help the home­less, you will like­ly find the Chris­t­ian Social Gospel more use­ful than Hin­du notions of caste. If you want to find tech­niques for qui­et­ing the mind through bod­i­ly exer­cis­es, you will like­ly find Hin­du yogis more use­ful than Chris­t­ian saints. (20)

The rest of the book is fine, I sup­pose. If you need a sum­ma­ry of the glob­al reli­gions you could do far worse than this one, but it does­n’t live up to the promise of the intro­duc­tion (hence the skim­ming allud­ed to in the first sen­tence of this post).

That notwith­stand­ing, I must con­fess that I liked one image from his sec­tion on Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty:

U.S. pres­i­dent Abra­ham Lin­coln once remarked that, when he sees a man preach, he likes “to see him act as if he were fight­ing bees.” Pen­te­costal­ism is replete with bee-fight­ing preach­ers. (87–88)

That’s my tribe — the mighty bee-fight­ers.

See­ing Kevin DeY­oung’s blog post today remind­ed me that I have anoth­er essay I’ve nev­er uploaded to my dig­i­tal library.

Every once in a while I talk with a stu­dent who’s not sure if they’re real­ly a Chris­t­ian, and so I wrote Test­ing My Faith — Being Con­fi­dent of My Sal­va­tion — it’s a med­i­ta­tion on some pas­sages in 1st John that help peo­ple dis­cern where they’re at with Jesus.

Hope you find it help­ful. As always, feed­back is appre­ci­at­ed.

Some­thing I need to do every quar­ter is plan out our Chi Alpha events, but there are few cal­en­dars in the for­mat I pre­fer. I like see­ing all the weeks of the quar­ter stacked on top of one anoth­er.

So I made a lit­tle tool that gen­er­ates a week­ly cal­en­dar for an arbi­trary date range (such as a quar­ter or a semes­ter). Just put the first day of class and the last day of finals in and the pro­gram should do the rest.

A fea­ture I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly proud of is that you can export the result­ing cal­en­dar to .doc (Microsoft Word) for­mat so you can cus­tomize it with your own events.

The script is ugly but func­tion­al. The result­ing cal­en­dars, on the oth­er hand, are pret­ty and func­tion­al. 🙂