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Suffering Olympics: Is There Any Point to Comparing the Holocaust to Gaza?

By Jonathan L. Walton

A UC Santa Barbara professor is currently in the midst of a political and academic firestorm. In January, sociology professor William I. Robinson sent what he considered to be a provocative email to 80 students enrolled in his sociology of globalization course comparing photographs of Jewish victims of the Holocaust with similar images of Palestinian victims of Israel’s latest Gaza attacks. Robinson, who is Jewish, offered his own written comment…

RDBook: Technology and Tradition: Carlson’s Indiscrete Image

By Nathan Schneider

…osopher, a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. By connecting Martin Heidegger’s understanding of life in the shadow of death with how certain Christian mystics thought of life under the gaze of God, he uncovered their common approach to human nature. To be made in the image of God, a God whose likeness we see only incompletely and through its absence in the world, means that our own definition is equally…

The Search For Proofs For God’s Existence

By Gordon Haber

…fter earning an MA in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Schneider began his editing career at Killing the Buddha, an online religion magazine. As a writer, Schneider has brought a clear-eyed enthusiasm to his commentary on the Occupy movement for The Nation, Harper’s, and The New York Times. He has also written about the largesse of the Templeton Foundation and profiled the anthropologist Gabriella Coleman for The…

What Salman Rushdie’s Attacker Shares with Insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…s ago I happened to sit next to Salman Rushdie at dinner when he was at UC-Santa Barbara to give a talk. I asked him why he didn’t have any security guards around him. “I have to live my life,” Rushdie answered. And after nine years of living in hiding under the pseudonym of Joseph Anton (Joseph for Joseph Conrad and Anton for Anton Chekhov, two of his favorite authors), it’s understandable that he would want to celebrate his freedom. He moved to…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…e of nationalism was emerging in individual states, the media explosion of cheap print caused a type of epistemic collapse where truth itself was uncertain. With such uncertainty, Europeans experienced the simultaneous birth and death pangs of two different eras, where medical historian John Waller claims that this dance phenomenon was a “hysterical reaction … one that could only have occurred in a culture steeped in a particular kind of supernatu…

I’m Too Sexy for My Church: Will a Thriving Singles Scene Renew American Catholicism?

By Megan Sweas

…an, visiting from Michigan, is checking out the church community to see if Santa Monica might be a good place to move. A group leader emphasizes that through YMA you can go out to bars and talk about God, but in casual conversation others downplay religion, stressing that members are “normal” and not “Bible-thumping” Catholics. Statements like these reflect the journeys many have taken. Afterward, three women tell me they were raised Catholic but…

Religion is Not about Belief: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

By Brian McGrath Davis

…ls and language of faith in the way that Armstrong suggests. Schizophrenic Santa Claus Likewise, on the cultural register, ‘God’ is simultaneously the one who is blessing America, the one healing Grandma, the one directing airplanes into buildings and suggesting wars, the one responsible for countless Grammies and Oscars, the moral one who endorses inequalities, and the one who, we are told, has a plan for us and stoically uses life’s unbearable p…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…. We often learn about God as children, at the same time as we learn about Santa Claus. But as we mature, our ideas about Santa Claus change and become more sophisticated, though our ideas about God can get stuck in an infantile mode and become thereby incredible. So in The Case for God I was trying to show that people in the premodern world would have found much of our God-talk today as frankly idolatrous, and that many modern theologians, such a…

TV’s 9 Best Christmas (and 1 Festivus) Clips

By Michael J. Altman

…antly funny episode of The Cosby Show features Dr. Huxtable explaining how Santa Claus is bigger than race. Night Court gave us a Christmas episode that features both Santa and Michael J. Fox. That’s pretty amazing. The Simpsons have so many great Christmas moments but here’s the very first. These are only ten episodes out of hundreds produced. Adding in all day movie marathons of A Christmas Story, Ranking/Bass Christmas specials, and h…

How Are the “Nones” Raising Their Children?

By Christel Manning

…iant plastic Santa in somebody’s front yard. “Mommy,” she asked, “Why does Santa come every year?” “To make people happy.” “Why does he want to make people happy?”” “Because it’s Christmas.” “But why does he want to make people happy on Christmas?” I had to stop and think. If I say that’s the day when Jesus was born, then the next question will be, who is Jesus? And how do I answer that one? I’d left Christianity years ago, so it felt hypocritical…