Opinion Archive

My newest article, “A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a conference,” for ToledoFAVS.com (our local hub of the Religion News Service) is up. In this piece I reflect on this year’s annual meetings of The American Academy of Religion and The Society of Biblical Literature through the eyes of two scientific studies on group

My newest article (“Why the world could use a few brave outcasts“) is up at ToledoFavs.com, a local hub for the Religion News Service. This new piece is on the perils of “groupthink.” It’s a subject that has been on my mind lately, largely because of incidents like the alleged abuse in the Boy Scouts and

My newest piece, “Why Blasphemy Laws Are Not About Religion,” is up at The Huffington Post. In it I look at what I consider the real reasons behind blasphemy laws: to preserve power. After the online film “Innocence of Muslims” mocked the Prophet Muhammad and led to violent and deadly protests internationally at U.S.

Never underestimate the power of bias. My newest article, “Forgive us our biases, as we forgive,” for Toledo Faith and Values (the local news hub for the Religion News Service) shows just how pervasive bias is in our decision making. In this piece for their culture and science section, I look at three scientific studies on bias

According to statistics, faithlessness in America is a growing trend. The numbers are beginning to show that unbelief is on the rise and there are closed church buildings to demonstrate that reality. “Crises of Faith by the Numbers (and Dashes)” (my first article for the local hub of the Religion News Service, ToledoFAVS.com) is

Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line by Jason Rosenhouse Oxford University Press, 2012 272 pages (Kindle) Available Amazon Powell’s Jason Rosenhouse’s Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line is not your usual book on creationism. When he’s not playing chess, Rosenhouse (Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University)

Updated: Would you vote for an atheist president? Some interesting numbers were released last week from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and Gallup. The Pew Forum survey looked at religious identification and the presidency and shows that most voters want to have a president with strong religious beliefs. The survey also

A study by psychologists at the University of Lincoln shows that the concept of loving one’s neighbor might be “hard-wired” into the brain (ScienceDaily). In an effort to avoid the ethical concerns of the famous study done by Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, who demonstrated that individuals were less likely to deliver an electric shock