Weekend Reads 12/23/17

The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society

That innocuous phrase — “biblical worldview” or “Christian worldview” — is everywhere in the evangelical world.…The phrase is not as straightforward as it seems. Ever since the scientific revolution, two compulsions have guided conservative Protestant intellectual life: the impulse to defend the Bible as a reliable scientific authority and the impulse to place the Bible beyond the claims of science entirely.

FDA plans crackdown on dangerous homeopathy; homeopaths say: bring it

Homeopathy is a centuries-old practice based on unscientific notions that if a substance—say a toxic chemical—can produce the same symptoms of an illness, it can be used to cure that illness (“like cures like”). But, homeopaths believe that the more diluted a substance, the more potent (“law of infinitesimals”), so many of their remedies are heavily diluted, often to the point where they only contain water.

Who framed Mary Magdalene?

The first witness to the Resurrection—as all four gospel writers agree—was a woman whose name and reputation have become so misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misconstrued over the centuries that she is more commonly, though erroneously, remembered as a prostitute than as the faithful first bearer of the Good News.

Trump lets Rapture preachers reset their countdown clocks

The timing for this seemed providential for white evangelicals in America. It came just in time to reassure them that all the cultural changes their fervent prayers had failed to prevent — the Civil Rights Movement, the end of (sectarian Protestant) prayer in schools, Medicare, feminism, hippies, peace protests, Woodstock, Elvis. Aron. Presley. — were not horrors to be lamented, but horrors to be celebrated as Signs of the End.