Emily Manuel at Religion Dispatches talks to Adam Kotsko about his new book, which is about atonement. She mentions someone posting on his blog that “we haven’t really thought through a proper atheism yet.”

Right. I think that you can see this with the New Atheists. Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ and Dennett’s books are a kind of simplistic critique of religion that’s basically not going to change anyone’s mind. I think there has to be more to say about religion other than the fact that it makes no sense as an empirical claim. That’s just too obvious to be interesting. I think that we as a society deserve a better form of atheism.

The claim that the simplistic critique of religion … Read the rest

Brendan O’Neill is a piece of work. You knew that, but I’m saying it anyway. He had himself a good time defending the pope against the evil atheists last year, but I didn’t know he’d recently amused himself by defending Dominique Strauss-Kahn against “the feminists”; but it was so.

I can’t help feeling that his arrest on charges of sexual assault is being turned into a modern-day medieval drama, a kind of reality-show version of the witch trials of old, in which DSK has been assigned the role of all-purpose hate figure rather than suspect in a crime.

Oh, sure you can. Did you try? Really try?

And feminists hate DSK because… well, because he is a man, and

Yes we just can’t ever hate women enough, there always has to be a new way to hate them even more.

At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.

South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the

There’s nothing like a good healthy sense of priorities, is there. What could be more urgent for Irish Catholics than to pitch a huge fit about an art installation that has something to do with “the Virgin Mary”?

In Our Lady and Other Queer Santas, Chicana artist Alma Lopez will exhibit her picture Our Lady, a digital pastiche of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a 16th-century Peruvian manifestation of the Virgin Mary…The Madonna in a bikini, basically…

On last Friday’s Liveline, one of Ireland’s most popular radio shows, presenter Joe Duffy was flooded with calls from irate Catholics mortified by this “blasphemous” artwork.

You see what I mean. That’s what these irate Catholics are irate about – a picture of something … Read the rest