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Indonesia: As Volcano Erupts, a Spiritual Loss

By Mark Woodward

…hern horizon. Merapi is always at least somewhat active. It “smokes” every day. In the more than thirty years that I have been visiting Yogyakarta, I have never seen Merapi without a plume of smoke rising from the summit. There are many in Yogyakarta who understand natural disasters in religious ways. Merapi holds a special place in the mystical variant of Islam that is common in the area. It is widely believed that there is an invisible North-Sou…

Giving RD The Finger?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…h the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, US News & World Report, and USA Today. This is all brilliant in its quiet, descriptive way. Silk is especially mindful of the ways in which we are bombarded by news and information from the time we wake to the time we retire. He has structured his response by simply walking us through his day, reminding us that we are always (both actively and semi-passively) receiving such information, sometimes to the poi…

Pricking the Conscience of Churches: From AIDS Activism to Ending World Hunger

By Susan Henking

…r life is not easy and the pain and suffering they see and experience each day can be quite overwhelming. Of course, I suppose we all sometimes suffer from self-pity or think our burdens are too great. Once after visiting an AIDS hospital in India that was more like a warehouse for the dying, I said to myself, “OK, I have to go back tomorrow, but that will be my last time. Others can do it from now on.” But then the next day, to my total surprise,…

Warpaint: What Does George W. Bush See in His “Portraits of Courage”?

By Sarah Sentilles

…was the last thing on my husband’s mind.” Bush now spends several hours a day painting. In his opening essay “Painting as a Passion,” Bush recalls telling one of his art teachers, “[T]here’s a Rembrandt trapped in this body . . . Your job is to liberate him.” He first painted a cube, then a watermelon, then an apple. He took online courses from the Museum of Modern Art to study art history. He painted his pets and landscapes at his ranch and self…

When Violence is Inevitable: Club Q and the Success of the System

By Heron Greenesmith

…do we? I have a young daughter and we were supposed to celebrate our birthdays on Sunday. We were supposed to celebrate our birthdays together by painting pottery and taking a trip to Target. We did do those things, and we laughed and we held hands and she ate a cake pop and I watched for shooters. What the hell do we do? In October 2022, two scholars from the Harvard Kennedy School published a paper recommending immediate responses to the threat…

Is ISIS A Sign of the End Times? It May Only Matter That They Believe So

By Haroon Moghul

…not an ordinary struggle, with defined objectives and the give-and-take of day-to-day politics, but what Reza Aslan described as “a cosmic war,” a struggle between pure good and outright evil, in which there can be no compromise, Russia’s involvement is a problem. Given Russia’s antagonistic relationship with several Muslim-majority regions, it may not be preposterous to believe Moscow’s Syrian intervention may strengthen ISIS rather than defeat i…

Will Millennials Forge a Future for the Progressive Black Church?

By Joshua L. Lazard

…n a moral and ethical reimaging of the social and political systems of the day. But his speeches at rallies and essays written for publication were much more inclined to draw a bead on the actors in the stage-play of American racism. Because King was a black preacher from the South, the “preaching” moment as it is understood had an elasticity that covered more than just the pulpit on Sunday morning. Many black preachers followed suit,“calling out”…

No More Pencils, No More Books: The Ultimate Goal of All Those Anti-Education Bills That Nobody’s Talking About

By Andrew L. Seidel

…about this fact so that, whatever the Supreme Court might decide (and nowadays there’s little guarantee the court would do the right thing), teachers simply avoided the subject to make their lives easier. It worked. This is also one of the Republican goals for imposing burdensome new requirements on voters—think voter IDs and barring same day registration—people will throw up their hands at the opaque, constantly-shifting bureaucracy and simply s…

Will Internet Kill Mormonism Too? Or Just Missionaries?

By Holly Welker

…ver ways they can. They shouldn’t be stuck in the same room eleven hours a day, six days a week, for two years. I’ve written about how pleased I am that the church is acknowledging howfruitless tracting is and is therefore moving toward having missionaries domore service. I hope that missions move toward incorporating as wide a range of activities as possible. I especially hope that a good chunk of time is dedicated specifically to study, or that…

The Transfiguration of the Fanboy: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, The Conclusion

By Mark Dery

…lapel-grabbing zealot, staple-gunning his Xeroxed screeds about the End of Days to every telephone pole in town. Who raptured these guys out of mass anonymity, into the beatitude of celebrity? Wasn’t it us, the true believers who knew every line of every song by heart, singing along as Ziggy implored, on the razor’s edge between yearning and taunting, Gimme your hands ‘cause you’re wonderful Gimme your hands ‘cause you’re wonderful In his marvelou…