Why Must Mary Remain a Virgin?

December 14, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Could it have more to do with controlling women’s bodies than any attempt to fulfill some biblical prophecy of Isaiah? A close look at the seventh chapter of Isaiah reveals the church’s misinterpretation of the text. In the fourteenth verse, the prophet Isaiah addresses the…

I Am Vermin

December 1, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

I am vermin, a pestiferous being to be eradicated, exterminated, extinguished. For you see, to call someone “vermin” is to embrace the belief of the danger vermin poses to the body. Pesticide is the only appropriate response to pestilence. As far as former president and Republican…

The Ethics of Turner’s Rebellion

November 14, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Before exploring the ethics of Nat Turner’s four-day slave revolt, it is important to plainly state my position, lest, as so often happens, people refusing to carefully read my writings impose upon them what they think are my opinions so as to dismiss me or…

Reimagining Satan as Trickster

October 25, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Halloween is just around the corner. As I decorate my house with hideous diabolical symbols, my thoughts return to a book historian Albert Hernandez and myself wrote a few years back, titled “The Quest for the Historical Satan.” Śātān appears nine times in the Hebrew…

Killing Capitalism

October 20, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Capitalism is devouring itself. The greatest threat to entrepreneurship is the savage neoliberal global economic order which has developed. No longer does financial opportunity exist for the one who builds a better mousetrap. Our current neoliberal order suffocates the entrepreneurial spirit capable of lifting individuals…

A Violent Tale of Two Cities

October 10, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

The day after I flew out of Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Hamas fired more than 2,000 missiles into Israel from the Gaza strip. Israel responded unmercifully. Hundreds are dead, thousands wounded. These numbers are expected to rise as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…

Domestic Tranquility for Whom?

September 27, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

These 19 words enshrined at the start of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution provide a vision for a republic yet established. They offered a new way of self-governance which entrusted people (defined as landholding white men)—not some deity—with sustaining a civil peace absent of…

Is Jesus Ambiguous on Violence?

May 3, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Apologists seeking to save God from God are quick to remind us that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a God of justice in order to explain the violence found there. They contrast these texts with the God of the Christian Testament – seen…

Why I Refuse to Save God from God

May 2, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

The Hebrew Bible introduces a tribal deity fighting Canaanite deities for land supremacy, instructing God’s people to do likewise. God’s chosen, liberated from Egypt’s bondage, are led to a Promised Land, which inconveniently, is already occupied. The solution? Portray them as evildoers existing outside God’s…

Will Humanity Heed the Warnings and Rise to the Occasion?

April 24, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Eurocentric thought is rooted in this religious context: that man (specifically cis-gendered males) is the pinnacle of creation. Psalm 8:4-9 informs this kind of thought and belief: “What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for…