The pro-life paradox, as I call it, begins with a single claim endorsed by many American Christians: infants and young children are innocent in the sight of God because they cannot yet take responsibility for their spiritual well-being. With this in mind, I argue that pro-life believers have unwittingly fallen victim to a theological paradox in which their attempts to save the earthly lives of unborn children make it theoretically possible for said children to die an eternal death. On the (...) one hand, many Christians trust in an eventual spiritual reckoning where God will separate the “sheep” from the “goats”, ushering the former into heaven while damning the latter to hell. However, those who cannot yet repent and seek salvation are not blamed for their spiritual failings. If they die, they go to heaven because they are too young and intellectually immature to know any better. But if dead children are spiritually blameless, then abortion practitioners have perversely and paradoxically saved millions of unborn souls by removing human volition from the equation and by making it possible for the unborn to experience the joys of heaven without the temptations of earth. (shrink)

Keith Haartman argues that childrearing practices distinctive of the English middle class in the 18th century produced a type of personality structure characterized by excessive splitting. Methodism proved popular because the Methodist experience providing a way of confronting and working through the conflicts generated by this sort of personality structure. Unfortunately, although Haartman's argument is plausible, there is little or no evidence to support his central contention: that the individuals who found Methodism most appealing were associated with the childhood experiences (...) he posits. A somewhat different psychoanalytic interpretation of the same data that Haartman presents emerges when we pay attention to things, like the orality that pervaded the Methodist experience and the intended goal of the Methodist conversion experience, that Haartman ignores. This article concludes by suggesting that when psychoanalytic investigators study large-scale historical patterns, they would do well to recognize the limits of psychoanalytic explanation in this area. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the fact of reasonable pluralism (FRP) – a famous Rawlsian assumption about the intellectual demographics of liberal democracies – is not as self-evident as is sometimes thought. The problem with the FRP is that in Political Liberalism Rawls is treating the freedoms and burdens story as being sufficient – in itself – to explain the demographics of reasonable pluralism. The inadequacy of the freedoms and burdens story is an indication that the FRP is empirically (...) underdetermined as a way of glossing the belief demographics of liberal democracies. And it is a reason to wonder whether pluralism is as permanent as Rawls thinks. But worldview disagreements are not necessarily so incorrigible. In response to the FRP, it can be asserted that there is nothing that is inherent in the idea of a liberal democracy to preclude the choice by the citizens of a common worldview. (shrink)

Ex-gay ministries, like many evangelical groups, advocate traditional gender ideologies. But their discourses and practices generate masculine ideals that are quite distinct from hegemonic ones. I argue that rather than simply reproducing hegemonic masculinity, ex-gay ministries attempt to realize godly masculinity, an ideal that differs significantly from hegemonic masculinity and is explicitly critical of it. I discuss three aspects of the godly masculine ideal—de-emphasizing heterosexual conquest, inclusive masculinity, and homo-intimacy—that work to subvert hegemonic masculinity and allow ministry members to critique (...) it while still advocating for innate gender distinction and hierarchy. I conclude by arguing that gender theorists need to be more precise in distinguishing conservative religious masculinities from hegemonic ones. (shrink)