JayMichaelson&ltjay@nehirim.orggt'
Culture

Burning Man in the Age of Rick Perry: Revelation, Pluralism, and Moral Imperative

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Like any pilgrimage site, Burning Man is less a destination than a pretext for the journey. These days, of course, flying into Reno isn’t so hard—but actually opening up to whatever Black Rock City has to offer… that journey can be arduous. If you go looking for a festival with sex and drugs and dance music, that is all you will find. But if you pause to wonder why there’s a temple in the middle of it, why people come back year after year even if they don’t do drugs, or, for that matter, how it is that the art, community, and culture of Black Rock City is constructed without a Them putting on entertainments for Us, much more can be received.   

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Culture

Tree of Life, Book of Job

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Structured around a family (mother, father, three children) which suffers a terrible loss, The Tree of Life is an extended midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Job, a verse of which forms the epigraph to the film and which is sermonized upon during an extended scene at a church. At once essentially Catholic and doggedly scientific in its worldview, its central family becomes an archetype, undergoing processes of childlike wonderment, Oedipal lust and rage, the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, and finally, it seems, redemption.

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(A)theologies

Tornado Hits the Heartland: Is God Punishing Us?

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Many of these weather events actually are a kind of “punishment”—not in the conservative-theological sense of tit-for-tat justice meted out by an Abusive Father on High, but in the more progressive-theological sense of unforeseen consequences of reckless human actions. Climate scientists have said for years that global climate change will lead to increased severe weather events, and now they appear to be here; along with droughts and poor harvests caused by shifting climatic belts. On a planetary basis, we are reaping what we have sown for two hundred years.

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Sexuality/Gender

Sex and Civilization: The Body as Battleground

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Today, we often are told that the hysterical ravings of the New Christian Right (NCR) are a pathological homophobia, or perhaps a displaced and sublimated yearning for homoeroticism. Doubtless both play a role, but I want to suggest that homosexuality does threaten civilization, when viewed from a certain perspective, and that it has been seen this way since biblical times. 

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