Accepting a psychiatric diagnosis is like a religious conversion. It's an adjustment in cosmology, with all its accompanying high priests, sacred texts, and stories of religion. And I am, for better or worse, an instant convert.
My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am ...
I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you coul...
Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but wh...
In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was—even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan ...
Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of 'Wessex', but the explorer of the transition of liv...
Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchant...
In college I took a social psychology course, something I thought useful for a career in advertising. Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help th...
Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who s...
The indigenous peoples of the great tourist spots seem to lose their souls. All cultural, religious, and political efforts and ideals are crippled since the culture is engaged only in luring ever more tourists. It is not the contact with an essential...
Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we're doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in o...
If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at...
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheism' is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist.' We do not...
What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist’s subject be religious to be Christian? I don’t think...
It has always been difficult for Jews to take Christians serious, mostly because Christians lack the fundamentals that religious Jews learn in their youth. It remains an embarrassing fact, that modern Jews can comprehend the New Testament better than...
Religious Jews believe that all things come from God, as God owns everything. The Tanakh says, “The Lord makes some poor and others rich; he brings some down and lifts others up” (NLT, 1 Samuel 2:7). “The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, and...
The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The ...
Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good ...
Your haughty religious people would have held their heads up to see me as I am tonight, and preached of flames and vengeance,' cried the girl. 'Oh, dear lady, why ar'n't those who claim to be God's own folks as gentle and as kind to us poor wretches ...
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appe...
Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we is this: When we die, one of t...
