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Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…ompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them. Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the recording and sharing of recitation of prayers and liturgy. But as religious texts go digital, they acquire new qualities. What are the…

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…nalism is good, but individualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marriages in many countries. I am glad to see that in Section 34 he understands this basic fact of contemporary western culture: The ideal of marriage, marked by a commitment to exclusivity and stability, is swept aside whenever it proves inconvenient or tiresome. The fear of loneliness and the desire for stability and fidelity exist sid…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

Introduction: That Muslim Was an Atheist I was on a flight to Los Angeles many years ago, and after a few hours of nobly but futilely fighting the boredom, I ventured a conversation with the middle-aged man fate and ticketing had seated next to me. We started chatting because we were listless, but soon found a common interest. It turned out that my fellow passenger was a diehard L.A. Lakers fan. Unlike me, he was a successful dentist who lived…

What Makes a Human Bomb Tick?

By Gordon Haber

…uslims” and that Islam will “drive the Jews out of Palestine.” However, as Adam Lankford points out in The Myth of Martyrdom, Abdulmutallab’s story is more complicated. Between 2005 and 2007, Abdulmutallab uploaded hundreds of messages to an Islamic web forum. His posts reveal that often he felt isolated and lonely: “i am in a situation where i do not have a friend… i have no one to speak too [sic].” He also professed shame about his sexual urges….

Finding the Missing Airliner with Coconuts

By Joseph Laycock

Who gets to define what a “real” Islamic practice is? Malaysians have been debating this question ever since a bomoh (a Malaysian shaman) arrived at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and attempted to locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a magical ritual that combined Islamic elements with shamanic practices. On Thursday Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as Rajah Bomoh Sedunia Nujum, delivered a press conference (in which he demonstrated a s…

Why the Disappeared Malaysian Airliner Brings Out the Paranormal

By Joseph Laycock

…f disaster and cultural crisis. My last post discussed Ibrahim Mat Zin, a Malaysian bomoh, who claimed that government authorities asked him to help locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a shamanic ritual. Israeli psychic Uri Geller has now announced via Twitter that he too has been asked to help search for the missing plane. Geller rose to media fame in the 1970s for his alleged ability to bend spoons with his mind. He’s hinted he could hel…

Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

By April L. Bogle

…er own country, and has lent her considerable status to the grassroots India Against Corruption campaign as the movement evolves. What some are calling India’s Arab Spring has been more like a summer of discontent, complete with demonstrations and arrests, all in support of this epic fight against government corruption—what Anna Hazare, whose hunger strike made headlines, has named “India’s second freedom struggle.” I was glad to have the chance t…

Why We Stay: What the History of Mormonism Reveals About the Origins of “Race”

By Max Mueller

…to fit into a broader culture that was suspicious and threatened by his unparalleled talents and charisma. Race and the Making of the Mormon People Max Perry Mueller UNC Press August 2017 These personal experiences with religious and racial “others”—the Mormons and Jason—primed me to fall in love with the story of Jane Manning James (a painting of James graces the book’s cover). In the early 1840s, as a young, single mother in Connecticut, James c…

Fight the Power: How to Read, and Re-Read, the Book of Revelation

By Wil Gafney

…n Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess.” She’s a false prophet, like Balaam—but of course those are insult names for Gentiles that John would have gotten from the Hebrew bible. And of course both of these “false prophets” were Gentiles. They were. And they were saying things that John thought were completely wrong; they were teaching people, he thought, to violate purity in terms of sexuality and in terms of food. So John detests them—and he th…

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…lly in the person’s own best interests: you offer to pay your seatmate to vacate, or you claim that contraception is harmful to women. Third, if none of that works, you create costs for both the authority attempting to regulate you and the innocent bystanders around you in the hopes that if you create enough problems the authority in question will cede way (in other words you block the aisles for a 10 hour flight, or you file lawsuits and cost the…