Christianity has lost control of its brand. That matters even for nonbelievers because Christian symbolism permeates Western culture. It shapes the source code for how we think about ourselves and what we expect from one another. If God is all-controlling, then human control is divinely sanctioned. Our efforts to control one another have cosmic legitimacy--the legitimacy claimed by fundamentalists pursuing a political agenda that has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth. But if God is defi...

In this direct, eloquent, unabashed argument on behalf of sexual fidelity--its meaning, its blessing, its rewards, its necessity--Catherine Wallace addresses a major concern of our time.At a time when emotional commitments are increasingly nervous, fragile, and short-lived, Wallace's vision of faithful lovers--with its aura of warmth, calm, and emotional continuity--is almost shockingly attractive.Speaking to heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, she reminds us how deeply th...

Come to church or go to hell. That's religious bullying. It's judgmentalism. And it's a theological distortion, a distortion insisting that shame and self-loathing are morally appropriate. In Christian humanist tradition, God is not some cosmic judge eager to smite all of us for our sinfulness. God is compassion. We are cherished by God beyond our wildest imagining. We are called to radical hospitality, not to crass judgmentalism. So where does this religious judgmentalism come from? It is...

Writing in part for secular humanists, non-Christians, and ex-Christians, Wallace locates the beginning of religious vilification of LBGTQ Americans: these attacks recycle earlier, equally reactionary political opposition to racial desegregation and equal rights for women. Then, step by step, she lays out three major flaws in the religious argument against gay marriage. First, it derives from Plato and Greco-Roman sexual anxieties, not from Jesus. Second, opposition to gay marriage takes B...

Confronting Religious Denial of Science: Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination traces the cultural backstory of contemporary conflicts between biblical literalists who oppose evolution and "New Atheists" who insist that religion is so pernicious it should be outlawed, if not exterminated. That's a clash of fundamentalisms. It's a zero-sum game derived from high Victorian misunderstanding of both religion and science. The God whom science supposedly replaces is the Engineer Almighty ...

Jesus did not die to save us from God. He died because the Romans did not tolerate charismatic teachers who attracted a lively following. Jesus attracted that following through his personal compassion, his confrontational inclusivity, and his skill in using laughter as a nonviolent weapon of mass disruption. The Gospel authors picked up Jesus' witty techniques. They adeptly parodied the literary conventions of heroic biography, laying out "the kingdom of God" in a point-for-point contrast ...

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy provide the conceptual foundations of theocracy, which is to say religiously-based totalitarianism. These absolutist doctrines emerge for the very first time among the Victorians: they are not ancient beliefs at all. They appear in the 19th century, right alongside secular varieties totalitarian thought, and in response to all the same cultural anxieties. Reactionary religious leaders used these doctrines to oppose scholarly conclusions in geology...

Confronting Religious Violence: Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination tells the tale of Christian theocracy in the West. Who converted whom was never entirely clear: the empire did stop feeding people to the lions for public entertainment; but Christianity was theologically corrupted by its official role in legitimating empire-as-usual. That theological corruption led to crusades, inquisitions, torture, and so forth. And it leaves us with a major question: is God violent? More dange...

First published in 1983, this book examines a work whose intricacies have baffled and infuriated generations of readers and proposes a theory of Coleridge’s writing habits that "explain(s) his explanation". The author painstakingly analyses the Biographia’s organising structure distinguishing between the daring conception and often inept execution of Coleridge’s idea of critical discourse. It is argued that Coleridge’s autobiographical format present a richly metaphorical "self" w...

Wallace has only ever wanted one thing—to make his father proud. It’s the only reason he’s training to become a council assassin, but he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to go into that line of work. The problem is that his father won’t take no for an answer.Hawthorne has known Wallace is his mate since the first day of training. He’s too old and grumpy for the young man, so he’s been hiding his scent from him while he tries to find a way out of it, even though he’s not sure he wants ...

Wallace has only ever wanted one thing—to make his father proud. It's the only reason he's training to become a council assassin, but he's not sure he'll ever be able to go into that line of work. The problem is that his father won't take no for an answer.Hawthorne has known Wallace is his mate since the first day of training. He's too old and grumpy for the young man, so he's been hiding his scent from him while he tries to find a way out of it, even though he's not sure he wants ...

SPECIAL COLLECTORS’ EDITION with commentary by eight science-fiction writersKING KONG: His very name inspires awe, horror, and, for some of the greatest masters of contemporary science fiction, a strong affection. Find out why in this special collector’s edition of the original 1932 novelization of Wallace and Cooper’s movie, which includes commentary by eight masters of science fiction. Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, Orson Scott Card, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Catherine Asaro, ...