Religion

“FELL LIKE FIRE”:

One Man’s Quest for the End of the World Started on a Ranch in Texas: A Texas businessman believes he was divinely chosen to help usher in the Second Coming of Christ—by finding unblemished red heifers and getting them to Israel. (Andrew Logan, March 2026, Texas Monthly)

It was nearly Christmas, and Jerome Urbanosky was expecting unusual company. The easygoing 72-year-old rancher stood outside his redbrick home, watching as a dozen or so vehicles crunched along the gravel road that winds through the grassy plain of his 1,500-acre ranch northwest of Houston. The delegation that piled out into his driveway included high-ranking rabbis who’d flown straight from Israel, a U.S. documentary crew toting multiple cameras, and a Texas businessman named Byron Stinson.

Urbanosky was taken aback by the size of the crew—but that wasn’t the thing that startled him the most. Four men dressed in black tactical gear and carrying military rifles approached and told him they needed to sweep the property to make sure no “foreign agents” were present. “They were armed to the teeth,” Urbanosky remembered. He wasn’t inclined to stand in their way. His wife, Jane, who was in the kitchen preparing the weekly Sunday meal, stared saucer-eyed as the armed men entered her home.

Once the security team cleared the property, Urbanosky led the rabbis to a red barn, where two calves awaited. Urbanosky Ranch is home to a herd of more than 450 Santa Gertrudis cattle, a hardy breed that’s known to produce good beef and whose origins trace back to the King Ranch, in South Texas. But as Urbanosky knew, this delegation wasn’t here for a steak.

Santa Gertrudis cattle also have striking coats of deep rusty red, which is what had initially attracted Stinson’s attention. A seventy-year-old Glen Rose business owner who’s described himself as a “Jesus zealot,” Stinson had visited Urbanosky at his ranch once before and explained that he was in search of an unblemished, completely red heifer—a scratch or a single white hair, and it wouldn’t do. Such a heifer hadn’t been identified in two thousand years, but it was key to unlocking an ancient Jewish ritual described in the book of Numbers, a necessary precursor to constructing the Third Temple in Jerusalem and, ultimately, bringing about the Second Coming of Christ. It’s a fringe but nonetheless influential belief, and Stinson’s Israeli associate, Yitshak Mamo, had convinced Urbanosky that he, too, was essential to this journey.

Urbanosky, a Catholic who attends weekly Mass, had never heard of the Jewish ceremony. He was wary at first, but Stinson was tireless, and Mamo told Urbanosky that, just maybe, God had indeed chosen him to deliver the sacred heifer. “It has shaken my psyche,” he said. “I don’t have this superiority complex. I know that my wife doesn’t think I’m anything special.”

PATH TO OBLIVION:

Worrying Picture for Buddhism Worldwide (Tsering Namgyal Khortsa, 3/21/26, Asia Sentinel)

According to the latest analysis by the Pew Research Center, covering 201 countries and territories, Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population declined between 2010 and 2020 despite the powerful charisma of the Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and global recognition as a figure of peace, and Buddhism’s rational self-help approach emphasizing inner peace, compassion, and mental discipline over dogmatic belief or divine authority. […]

Demographic trends are not favorable to Buddhism. Nearly all Buddhists—98 percent—live in the Asia-Pacific region, with around 40 percent concentrated in five East Asian societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. These regions tend to have older populations and lower birth rates. The median age of Buddhists globally is about 40, significantly higher than the global median of 31. Fertility rates among Buddhists are also low, averaging 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain population size.

As a result, between 2010 and 2020, the number of Buddhists in these five East Asian societies fell by approximately 32 million, or 22 percent.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

King Kong Died for Our Sins: Why Unexpected Christ Figures Matter (Mike Schramm, 3/11/26, Christ & Culture)

No, Kong was not the heroic Christ figure one expected, but that is what made him a thought-provoking one.

Fiction—whether in novel, TV, or movie form—is filled with similarly unexpected, almost scandalous, Christ figures. Fans of Breaking Bad may have noticed Walter White’s cruciform pose that followed the death that saved his downtrodden former partner. While the bear-man Beorn from The Hobbit fights for good in the end, his chaotic unpredictability coupled with his hypostatic union of bear and human natures point to Christ’s unpredictable actions throughout the Gospels.

One final example from fiction I remember: Having to write a paper on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in high school, I was struck by one prompt proposing Randall McMurphy as a Christ figure. He is an outsider to the mental health facility who operates beyond the level of the inhabitants. He continually upends the status quo and frustrates the established authorities. He seeks to emotionally free the imprisoned and it is his death that contextualizes Chief Bromden’s escape (being the narrator, he is also a stand-in for us, so it is our freedom that is instantiated too).

One would like to think we were the prompt.

EMPATHY IS A HOAX:

The Cartesian Ghost and Gilbert Ryle’s Critique (Robert Kmita, 3/07/26, Voegelin View)

In the same ironic style, Ryle continues by maintaining that, according to the dualist perspective, each of us lives “the ghostly life of a Robinson Crusoe,” exiled on the island of his own soul, lost somewhere within the body. As a logical consequence, no person has access to the “intimacy,” to the events of another person’s inner life. Therefore, we could do no more than speculate by using “problematic inferences” based on certain behaviors that uncertainly signal what the agent is thinking.

Heck, you don’t even comprehend your own inner being.

CHILDREN OF FAITH:

My Conversion to Skeptical Belief (Christopher Beha, 2/10/26, NY Times)

To many, this will sound like a bit of a paradox, since skepticism and belief are understood to be in serious tension, if not outright opposition. We are all skeptical at certain times about certain things, but when we refer to someone more generally as a “skeptic,” we tend to mean that this person bases beliefs about the world entirely on the rational examination of objective evidence. More pointedly, we almost always mean that this person does not believe in God. But this is not at all the term’s historical meaning.

The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis is often counted as the first philosophical skeptic. His complete doubt about the possibility of any human knowledge extended so far that, according to an ancient, possibly apocryphal account, he refused even to accept the evidence of his senses while walking down the street, “taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not.” (His less skeptical friends followed behind to keep him out of trouble.)

Pyrrho’s first great modern disciple, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, would not even say that he knew nothing, which seemed to express too much certainty. He preferred to put the matter as a question: “What do I know?” Yet Montaigne’s essays contain countless expressions of Christian piety. Precisely because we can’t have knowledge about even the most basic points, he argued, we must inevitably take certain things on faith — at least, if we don’t have friends kind enough to spend their lives guiding us around dogs and carts.

It’s possible to understand the entire modern philosophical tradition as an effort to grapple with the extreme skepticism that Montaigne reintroduced to Western culture without falling, as Montaigne did, back on faith. Four hundred and fifty years later, that project has brought us to a strange point.

The strangeness resides in the fact that reason disproves the foundations of Reason and demonstrates that all is faith.