I have discovered one of the advantages of having a blog is that people start sending you really interesting things. Thanks to Jason for the link to the Society of Mutual Autopsy. These folks are amazing. What are they?

SoMA is a magazine devoted to dissecting matters of the soul—the sacred and the profane, the ridiculous and the sublime. We don’t think of religion primarily in terms of churches or institutions. We side with the theologian Paul Tillich who understood faith, and indirectly religion, as “ultimate concern.” He saw faith as a movement toward the unconditional, or God, the “ground of being” that eludes theistic thinking. Thus, religious vitality can be found in things that aren’t overtly religious, such as a “secular” films, art, and literature. Similarly, explicitly religious beliefs, symbols, and systems easily become rigid and lose their meaning, turning idolatrous. As Tillich said, religion itself is paradoxically one of the great threats to the religious life.

This is a group of people with some ideas I can get behind. I have just barely scratched the surface of their archives, but I have already found some really interesting and provocative articles: Betraying Jesus, The SoMA Idolatry Quiz, and The Anti-Purpose-Driven Life. I can see I am going to have a lot of reading to do at this site.