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“Split at the Root”: Adrienne Rich and (Religious) Identity

By Ryan Harper

…and into her college years, she became sensitive to the subterranean presences and conspicuous absences of Jewishness in the home of her upbringing. She realized her Jewishness would always be at once a choice and a kind of irresistible inheritance. As a Jew, Rich claimed and was claimed by a vast, often internally-dissident tradition (she had the advantage of wrestling with a tradition that had wrestling in its marrow). She also insisted upon cl…

Even After an Obama Victory Reports of the Death of the Religious Right are Greatly Exaggerated

By Bill Berkowitz

…folk to meet with Obama administration officials and to work together on a number of policy issues including Obama’s plan for revitalized faith-based initiatives, global warming, combatting AIDS in Africa and poverty at home and abroad. “Look for the stock of religious conservative leaders such as Rick Warren, Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of Obama, and Cameron Strang, publisher of Relevant, a hipster Christian magazine that puffed Obama,…

As Psychedelics Experience a Renaissance, Emory’s New Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality Seeks a Novel Approach

By Hollis Phelps

…ost part, approached the suggestion that certain drugs may occasion experiences that resemble experiences we deem ‘religious’ with skepticism. Most, having come from religious backgrounds, been taught that drugs and religion simply don’t mix, a suspicion that not only tracked with broader sociocultural and political assumptions about psychedelics, but one that consigned the use of these substances to the underground. The Controlled Substances Act…

Seeing the Future: Can Religion Evolve and Survive in a Changing World?

By Peter Savastano

…d postmodern world? Back in the 1960s, sociologists predicted that the advancement of science and technology would usher in a secular worldview and that religion would eventually fade into the past. Or if it did manage to survive, they imagined, religion would become the purview of a small segment of the population that, kicking and screaming, has refused to enter into the contemporary world. Of course, we now know that the sociologists were wrong…

Mormons Prepare to March in Seven LGBT Parades this Weekend

By Joanna Brooks

…there are large carve-outs for church-related/owned businesses, the ordinances in SLC inspired a number of other Utah and Idaho towns and cities to follow suit and opened many conservative Mormon’s eyes to some problems they’d never before considered. – There have been no church-sponsored efforts aimed at mobilizing Mormons to fight same-sex marriage at the polls the way Mormons were mobilized in California in 2008, despite efforts of other relig…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…the bullet of atheist mockery, not to mention skeptical inquiry, however unconvincingly. 7Quoted in George Tremlett, David Bowie: Living on the Brink (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997), pps. 20-1. 8Marc Spitz, Bowie: A Biography (New York, NY: Crown, 2009), p. 316. 9Auction catalogue for The Gary Pepper Collection of Elvis Presley Memorabilia, http://issuu.com/lesliehindman/docs/sale120_elvis. 10 See http://www.5years.com/madx.htm. 11Cathleen Medwi…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…lications as well. It gives Humanist service members access to Army Chaplaincy services, including spiritual counseling and gathering spaces for Humanist groups. It also means that the numbers and distribution of Humanists in the military can be tracked along with those of other religious groups, potentially inviting a reshaping of the military chaplaincy, which critics complain is inappropriately weighted in favor of Christian, and specifically E…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…ommunities of common understanding, around people who affirm us and make us feel normal. But perhaps with increased visibility—with nakedness, so to speak—can come increased tolerance, and eventually, an increase in compassion, without which there is no understanding. …

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…this message? Mercy is not something we discuss very often. Our rates of incarceration, the number of states utilizing the death penalty, our obsessive clinging to the Second Amendment along with its deadly consequences, ICE raids on immigrant families fleeing even worse violence in their home countries, drone strikes, the environmental violence of fracking, deforestation and coal mining, and the daily threats faced by women, LGBTQ people and peo…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…ividual self-improvement rather than challenging the presumption and arrogance of wealth. Hence his title, “The Money Cult”: in what many are pleased to regard as a Christian nation, the functional faith of most believers has usually boiled down to a sanctified form of acquisitive individualism. It’s not possible to summarize the full sweep of Lehmann’s narrative here, but his sensitive treatment of several important sub-themes deserves to be high…