Steveawiggins

LATEST ARTICLES ( 4522 )

• Austin City Limits

  

  Maybe it’s just because Texas feels like the brass buckle of the Bible Belt, but I had moral qualms about landing in George Bush International Airport this... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2013 POLITICS, SOCIETY

• Continental Drift

  

  So this is the way epiphany works. (I know it’s Lent, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry.) I sat down to check my personal email after a horrid day at work, and... Read more

  Posted on 26 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• In Touch with History

  

  A friend recently sent me a package with a Roman jar handle from Caesarea Maritima. It’s not everyday that I receive 2000 year-old artifacts in the mail. Read more

  Posted on 25 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Wrongful Resurrection

  

  H. P. Lovecraft was a tortured man. An atheist, he saw the inevitable dilemma of human life. We want to live forever, but even the short time we have is full... Read more

  Posted on 24 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Apples to Apples

  

  Religion is all about death. Well, maybe not all, but still…All religions deal with death in some detail. Perhaps that’s because death is such a universal... Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Gods and Goliath

  

  Not only gods are proficient at creating worlds. Writers, as readers know, are the creators of worlds too. I first discovered Jasper Fforde via a friend’s... Read more

  Posted on 22 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Wolves and Sheep

  

  A state of the university address might not be a bad exercise.  If I might be so bold, as an inveterate outsider who nonetheless has tried to play by the... Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• No Play-Thing

  

  Possession. It’s one of the scariest concepts in the religious arsenal. The idea that a person could be taken over by a different entity and surrender his or he... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Near Earth Objects

  

  Even before the Chelyabinsk meteor, Time magazine had committed to the printers with a story on asteroid 2012 DA14. From our terribly parochial viewpoint, such... Read more

  Posted on 19 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• True Heroes

  

  As a guy with a healthy sense of the weird,it strikes me as odd that rational people can suppose that we’ve solved all of life’s great mysteries. Read more

  Posted on 18 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Tunguska 2.0

  

  The explosion of a meteor above Chelyabinsk on Friday immediately took me back to Tunguska five-score and five years ago. The Siberian Explosion, as we called i... Read more

  Posted on 17 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Portrait of God as a Young Man

  

  Famed swing state Ohio is back in the news with Jesus in the front lines. It was an unlikely setting to notice such a thing. I was sitting in a conference room... Read more

  Posted on 16 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Implausible Deniability

  

  Sandy gave us a little taste of dampness under the gunnel. You see, people live by the water because it beckons to us. That was actually Rachel Carson’s idea,... Read more

  Posted on 15 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Grown up Fish

  

  Embryonic recapitulation. That’s what it used to be called. I didn’t learn about this in biology class, but rather in the Creationist literature that... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Call It the Blues

  

  Coming back to The Blues Brothers after a couple of decades proved to be a kind of personal enlightenment. Of course I remembered “We’re on a mission from... Read more

  Posted on 13 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Popeless

  

  Pope Benedict XVI managed to catch many of us off-guard with his early retirement option. Not within living memory, or even very dusty, antiquated memory has a... Read more

  Posted on 12 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Maltese Faction

  

  The Crusades remain one of the most celebrated episodes of religious violence in the history of the church. I am certain that many would put forward other... Read more

  Posted on 11 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• God’s Country Club?

  

  Heaven is a sparsely populated place. Considering its vast celestial real estate, vis-a-vis the earth, it must be downright lonely. Maybe that’s the way the... Read more

  Posted on 10 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Peculiar Mythology

  

  Confession: I love books like Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Ambiguity in fiction is under-appreciated at times. Read more

  Posted on 09 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Rise of Religions

  

  Imagine my surprise when, as a boy raised in a fundamentalist family, I arrived at a liberal seminary to find myself accused of sexism. Like most kids I had bee... Read more

  Posted on 08 February 2013 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY