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“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

I appreciate Brent Plate’s analysis in these pages of Indie religious contemplation. But he must know that Americans are newcomers to the history of musical pronouncements on religion, and particularly the criticism of institutional religions. The Saw Doctors — one of my favorite bands — have been astute observers of religious hypocrisy for twenty years now. They have a well-deserved reputation for insulting Catholicism. The band is the project o…

Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

By Ann Gleig

…Buddhists. We borrow the term reactionary centrist from political theorist Aaron Huertas who defines it as “someone who says they are politically neutral but who usually punches left while sympathizing with the right.” Reactionary centrism, in other words, is a conservative ideological stance that sees and presents itself as transcendent of ideology. Such an approach is clearly at work among white Buddhists who claim to be apolitical while mobiliz…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…White House. Together with such prominent Buddhists and scholars such as Lama Surya Das and Virtual Orientalism author Jane Iwamura, Loncke and other attendees held aloft a large banner reading: “U.S. Militarism Breeds Violence, Not Safety. I Vow to Work for Peace & Freedom.” But not everyone was on board. In a blog post entitled “I Wish I Could Agree”, popular Zen teacher Brad Warner wrote: The banner those Buddhists leaders unfurled in front of…

What Do You Think?: “Padre Oprah” Scandal Has Many Asking Whether Priests Should Be Allowed to Marry

By Frances Kissling

…a TV show called “Hablando con padre Alberto,” was the victim of Mexican paparazzi for the celebrity magazine TVnotas. TVnotas published 25 photos of Cutie and a woman relaxing on the beach and kissing at a local bar. One photo shows Cutie with his hands in the woman’s bathing suit bottom. At least, some say, he wasn’t caught abusing a young boy. Cutie has spoken out. On CBS’s Early Show [watch video below] he said, “I believe I have fallen in lo…

Updated: G-O-D Plays a Bit Part in First GOP Debate

By Daniel Schultz

…is Wallace. Trump was clearly the winner, but beyond that, it gets hard to award points. Most of the candidates “won” in the sense that they didn’t flame out and/or eat a live baby on television, and most of them got off a good line or two. Carson didn’t get a lot of speaking time, but he used a bit of humor (“I’m the only one to take out half of a brain, although you would think, if you go to Washington, that someone had beat me to it”) and thoug…

Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

By The Editors

…Religion is all about top ten lists. From the Ten Commandments, to the ten avatars of Vishnu (Krishna was number eight), to Buddhism’s ten precepts, religions are all about systems, ethical prescriptions—or proscriptions—and grand schemes. Order out of chaos is the name of the game. All this to suggest that the Top Ten list is obviously something deeply ingrained in the human experience. So here, without further preamble, RD’s picks for the Ten Be…

Markets and Morality: Faith-Based Investment Group Profiles Polluters

By Frederick Clarkson

…r their investments were contributing to climate risk have had to rely on data provided by the corporations themselves about greenhouse gas emission and other pollutants. But now investors have a new, independent tool for evaluating corporate performance on emissions relative to other companies in a given sector—everything from automotive to financial to chemical companies. A coalition of nearly 300 faith-based investors, representing over $100 bi…

The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ingly inevitable crescendo. This Church, aggressively anti-modern for two papacies in a row, now seems decidedly tone-deaf, in addition to being intentionally out-of-step with the modern world. On the other side we have the Vatican Library and the Vatican Museums, eminently modern institutions that have drunk deeply from the well of modern ideas. Museums, and the libraries that birthed them, are modern institutions, after all. These places—the Chu…

I Was Nearly Seduced by David Brooks’ Reasonable Analysis

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…el Prize in Economics for his work on global markets and global trade, and Alan Greenspan’s rather shocking testimony on Capitol Hill Thursday. One is struck first by how entirely separate these two events are in current media reportage, almost as if to suggest that there are good economics and bad, and little in between, whereas most of the actual marketplace exists in that bizarre “in between.” Still more to the point, I was struck by David Broo…

Trump with back to camera stands before a frenzied crowd with raised fist.

With ‘Vermin’ Remark Trump Crosses Fully into Nazi Territory

By Robert P. Jones

…campaign that began with vulgar boasts about grabbing women by the genitalia and the mocking of a disabled reporter, to a presidency marred by repeated nods to White supremacists, it’s no surprise that Trump has produced outrage after outrage throughout his post-defeat, perpetual vengeance campaign. Even as a scholar who has tracked Trump’s rhetoric and its impact on his followers carefully since 2015, I have found myself, too often, responding to…