The Best Video Game Ever: Square’s “Vagrant Story”
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on the Best Video Games Ever. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, please click here. I don’t expect that...
Author: Kyle Cupp
Best Video Game Series Introduction
Evening to you, gamers. Tomorrow we’ll begin our promised series in which those of us with an itch to talk video games using lots of superlatives defend our pick for the title of best...
The Finest School
“I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between a parent and a child. Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one loves one’s parents...
Best Video Game Ever Series
Is there a particular video game you’re dying to tell us is the most space awesome game ever? We’ll be doing a brief series here starting the third week of June. We’re looking for...
Questioning Faith
Asking questions is dangerous business. I have friends and acquaintances who, after completing an inquisition into their own religious beliefs, forsook their religion, kicked the dust from their feet, and hit the road for...
Should I Desire That You All Follow My Religion?
I would hope not to court much controversy by saying that all of us should live in accordance with the truth. Call it a notion of natural law that I can get behind. That...
Roger Ebert, R.I.P.
Famous film critic Roger Ebert has died. He could be as scathing as any critic, but he also displayed a passionate love of movies and film-making more warmhearted and heartfelt than most others I...
To Fail as a Son
The last time I saw my father I was twelve years old. Before boarding the airplane that would return me to the home of my mother and step-father, I had sat on the edge...
Anita Sarkeesian and the Damsel in Distress Trope
In early 1986 Nintendo released the action-adventure video game The Legend of Zelda, and when I, a geeky eight-year-old, first got my hands on a NES controller and, with the press of a few...
Does Opposition to Abortion Demand Certainty That the Fetus Is a Person?
I agree with Ned Resnikoff that the issue of abortion hinges on the question of personhood, but I am not sure the question of personhood as related to nascent human life has to be...
The Meaning of Human Sexuality: A Philosophical Query
I don’t suppose I’ll be courting much controversy by saying that human sexuality has historical meaning. The sexual revolution would have made no sense had sex meant nothing to anyone. It was a reaction...
Being in Uncertainty
Claire Creffield, an atheist who finds that, sometimes, “invoking the concept of God seems a very compelling way indeed of doing justice to the strangeness, the beauty and the peril of our lives,” asks...
Visiting Heaven
Eban Alexander has journeyed to heaven and returned to tell the tale. In addition to writing an upcoming book, he chose to publish his private revelation in the pages of Newsweek. He’s a neurosurgeon,...
Loneliness and Loss
Not so long ago, I met a young couple who had unexpectedly lost their newborn baby shortly after birth. Upon my first seeing them, their heads were bowed and their eyes were downcast. Both...
Human Sexuality and Religious Norms
Decades after the sexual revolution, many religious conservatives remain fiercely committed to preaching, if not always living, an absolute and absolutist understanding of human sexuality. Mainstream biologists, psychologists and sociologists, building on the science...
Is Lust Really Immoral?
A friend recently related a story to me about how she was once rudely admonished by a fellow student at a religious university for wearing, at the gym, what he considered to be immodest...
My Secularism, Unraveling
Though a regular churchgoer and on most days a religious believer, I subscribe to the secularist principle that church and state ought to be kept separate. I don’t want government dictating religious belief and...
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Zombies
Zombie survival guides are a blood-stained dime a dozen, but won’t somebody please think of the zombies? It’s a hard “life,” full of unending hunger, long monotonous stretches of boredom, a homogenous diet, and...
