Stephen Prothero

At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus' divinity or…

— Stephen Prothero

“One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with…

— Stephen Prothero

Both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.

— Stephen Prothero

“If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to…

— Stephen Prothero

“Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that…

— Stephen Prothero

Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God,…

— Stephen Prothero

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been…

— Stephen Prothero

“True, (Jefferson's) rational religion ran in rivulets outside the American mainstream, but heterodoxy is faith of a different form and, like orthodoxy,…

— Stephen Prothero

“Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about…

— Stephen Prothero

“On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other…

— Stephen Prothero

Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our…

— Stephen Prothero

“Spirituality, in short, is religion stripped down to its experiential dimension. More than do-it-yourself religion, spirituality is do-without-religion, a form of faith…

— Stephen Prothero