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Conversion Story #643 (not a real number)

By Amina Wadud

…s hooked. I count my dates of entry from these two points: Thanksgiving day 1972 when I said shahadah, and March 1973, when I was began reading the Qur’an. For some time after that, all I read was Qur’an. Still today if things get freaky I return to just reading the Qur’an. Knowing it was originally in Arabic, I began studying Arabic through the local mosques until I could register for a course at my undergraduate University of Pennsylvania. In fa…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…enly realms, but in the traditional depiction of them, they are not vague “spiritual” places like the amorphous afterlife of Hereafter but actual places, albeit very different from any we usually know. Enter the Void is about the supernatural, but in a way it’s entirely naturalistic. The closest thing Hereafter presents as an authority figure, a Swiss hospice worker, says that she was once a skeptic, but was convinced over twenty years of working…

Indonesia: As Volcano Erupts, a Spiritual Loss

By Mark Woodward

…ng of a folk hero for his courage and was widely believed to have enormous spiritual powers. He appeared in advertisements for a popular brand of sports drink together with nationally known athletes. The advertisements suggested a relationship between the athletes’ physical prowess and Mbah Marijan’s spiritual power. I met Mbah Marijan only once, less than two months ago. He was a very deeply religious man in a very Javanese way. He was a pious Mu…

Sex and Civilization: The Body as Battleground

By Jay Michaelson

…ural) is that which curbs what we today might call “nature” in the name of spiritual discipline. Yes, Paul replaces physical circumcision with spiritual, but in doing so he creates a far more insidious apparatus of control. This is a nature of anti-nature. Ironic, then, that many of today’s anti-gay voices call homosexuality “unnatural” in a pseudo-scientific sense. They are wrong; Paul is right. Homosexuality is entirely too natural, found in ove…

Think Yoga is a Religion? Try Youth Soccer!

By Joanna Brooks

…ice-weekly practitioner of Bikram Yoga, the infamous 26-posture, 90-minute, 105-degree brand of hot yoga introduced to America and copyrighted by the eponymous Bikram Choudhury. Copyrighted? Yes, Bikram copyrighted his sequence of 26 postures, much to the chagrin of critics who say you can’t own sacred knowledge. But in the legal filing to copyright yoga, Bikram’s attorneys characterized yoga not as a religion but as something akin to a dance rout…

Note to Religious Liberals: God Does Take Sides

By Daniel Schultz

…ack into serfdom, unemployment benefits expired, and in a bid to bring the spirit of peace and generosity back to Christmas, Republicans threatened to filibuster the START treaty until tax cuts for the upper 2% of wealthy Americans were made permanent. Oh, and like a maraschino cherry high atop a lollapalooza of suck, we find out from Wikileaks that the Obama administration—with GOP help—basically has quashed the investigation into torture by slow…

Homeschooling and American Exceptionalism

By Julie Ingersoll

…ing whatsoever is to be added to this, whether by “new revelations” of the Spirit or by the traditions of man.” [emphasis in the original] Certainly homeschoolers are not monolithic; in fact the earliest years of the movement were dominated by lefties who rejected public education for its stifling regimentation, favoring what they often referred to as unschooling. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century homeschooling has become an industr…

Should Faith Healing ‘Do Business’ with Modern Medicine?

By Beatrice Marovich

…effect? It was with this ideas in mind that numerous studies throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s sought to determine whether religious practices such as prayer were healing forces whose efficacy could be verified through clinical trials and modern science. But, in 2006, the largest and most ambitious prayer study to date (led by the cardiologist Herbert Benson) indicated that patients who were prayed for (and were told about it, giving th…

Toward a Zombie Theology

By John W. Morehead

…g on the soul. The title of this episode, “TS-19″ referred to “Test Subject 19,” an unfortunate victim of the zombie infliction who allows scientists to monitor his brain as he goes from human to zombie. The scientist doing the computer recording, Dr. Jenner, narrates the changes he sees as the infection progresses. He makes a distinction between “the first event,” or infection leading to death, and a “second event” or “resurrection event” that ma…

Wojnarowicz’s Ant-Covered Jesus: Blasphemy or Religious Art?

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…Diamanda Galás (“This is the Law of the Plague” with lyrics from Leviticus 15). The 13-minute version that Wojnarowicz edited is silent. Much of the imagery comes from Wojnarowicz’s time in Mexico in the 1980s, and shot on Super-8 film. Mexican Day of the Dead ceremonies mix with Aztec statues; scenes of professional wrestling merge with cockfights and bullfights; strong crucifixion imagery merges with street scenes from Mexican cities and towns;…