Blog Archives
A Response to Alain de Botton’s “Religion for Atheists”
This past weekend I happened across an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which contained excerpts from Alain de Botton’s newest book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion. The title of the op-ed was changed to read “Religion for Everyone”, probably because the editors felt it would attract a broader audience. While I have not read the book (it publishes in the US in March), the extra-long op-ed piece — presumably inclusive of the “choicest” portions of the book — grants enough of a basis for this response.
De Botton’s goal is quite simple: “to reclaim our sense of community…without having to build upon a religious foundation”. To this end, he chooses idealized religious customs and considers how to clone them for society-at-large. This has been done before, of course (see: Socialism). Read the rest of this entry
Book Review: “The Lord of the Ring — In Search of Count Von Zinzendorf”
If you read my previous review of a recent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then you know that what really interested me was the influence the Moravian Brethren had upon Bonhoeffer and his conception of the church and even what we may call the church life. In this post I look at a biography of the seminal figure behind the Moravian Brethren (outside of Christ, naturally): Count Nikolaus Ludwig Von Zinzendorf. This will be the second of what I anticipate to be a trilogy of reviews related to the German/Moravian contribution toward the organic church life — that elusive, harmonious, authentic, and transformative living of believers described in the early scenes of the church in Acts 2 and still sought after today in the closing chapters of church history. Read the rest of this entry