Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God

12/06/15 • 29 min

Twenty-five percent of all the people incarcerated in the world are in America's prisons. 60% of those are people of color. America is a "carceral state." Taking on "Lockdown America" a triad of "police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty" Mark Lewis Taylor, the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, has written a second edition to The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America. Taylor finds in the symbol, "The Executed God" a "power in and of the people" to resist the state theatrics of terror with a counter theatrics to terror in three parts: "cultivating adversarial politics, creating dramatic actions, and catalyzing social movements."

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Peter Steinberger, The Problem With God

Peter Steinberger is the Robert H. and Blanche Day Ellis Professor of Political Science and Humanities at Reed College in Portland. His area of expertise is political philosophy. But he ventured into a book about the concept of God. It is called The Problem With God: Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All Be Wrong. We talk about why it is meaningless to talk about God. There is no such idea. Curious?

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Rodney Wilson, Killing God

Rodney Wilson teaches school at a community college in Missouri. He was the first openly-gay K-12 public school teacher in Missouri and founded LGBT History Month (October). He has a master's degree in religion and history and he turned his master's thesis into a book, Killing God: Christian Fundamentalism and the Rise of Atheism. In it he analyzes the responses of 1,600 people who left religion for atheism. He found four primary factors that contributed to their "deconversion." You may resonate.