Bentley Owen reads books and lives in Tulsa, OK. He's on twitter.
Anahita is a 28 year-old Iraqi woman who fronts two black metal bands. She was raised in an Islamic household, though not a strict one. She recounts how she came to reject her parents’ religion to music writer Kim Kelly in a recent article for The Atlantic. She lost her faith, as so many do, between the pages of a book. “I was reading some scientific facts and how Islam doesn’t make sense at all with the current science, and… Read more
Sean Harris is the senior pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He’s in the news because of a sermon he delivered in conjunction with “Marriage Sunday,” an initiative intended to get out the vote for a proposed same-sex ban. He had some thoughts about gender roles and parenting that deserve a closer look [emphases mine]. So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a… Read more
In the past two weekends, I visited two different churches with various members of my family. They know about my lack of faith, and I’m at a point where I don’t feel intimidated by religious services or guilty of about my skepticism. Going to church solely for the sake of spending some time with them finally seems like a sensible solution. I don’t regret the decision, either, because the two services provided an interesting study in contrasts. The first was… Read more
The best cable news show on television is about to get even better. Apparently inspired by the Reason Rally, tomorrow’s episode of Up With Chris Hayes is billed as “an unprecedented look at atheism in America,” and will feature a panel with Richard Dawkins, Jamila Bey, Susan Jacoby, and Steven Pinker. Also appearing will be comedian and Reason Rally speaker Jamie Kilstein, journalist Robert Wright (an agnostic), and “a Christian clergyman [who] will reveal himself as an atheist.” The show airs live… Read more
I arrived a half hour early to the Mabee Center at Oral Roberts University, which turned out to be a good idea. There were already hundreds of people crowded into the lobby waiting for a “town hall” sponsored by the ORU College Republicans featuring Rick Santorum. The event was initially scheduled to take place in a banquet hall, but it was later moved to a TV studio (yes, the campus has a TV studio). By the time I arrived, it had finally been moved to… Read more
