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Radicalization and Religion, Cont’d.

By Julie Ingersoll

….’” That line was lifted and made the title of the post which made it more central than it really was and also slightly changed its meaning. In a thoughtful and helpful reply James Scaminaci questions the notion that radicalization might not be related to “religion,” showing how an important component of radicalization is a “worldview based in religion: a battle of Good versus Evil and an apocalyptic view” and I certainly agree with him. Indeed, I…

Capricology: Television, Tech, and the Sacred

By Diane Winston

…year’s fantastic Moon. b) Afterlife: A belief in some sort of afterlife is central to many religions and it may have been pivotal in the origins of religions in the first place. How will this play out on Caprica, where the boundaries between what is alive and what is not are already getting quite blurry? Does it shape monotheism or polytheism in a particular direction? In addition to all this, we have the monomania (as Diane calls it) of Daniel Gr…

Aung San Suu Kyi: The Verdict is Unfair

By Juliane Schober

…lite. People’s participation in social and political transformation is the central issue of our time. This can only be achieved through the establishment of societies which place human worth above power, and liberation above control. In this paradigm, development requires democracy, the genuine empowerment of the people. When this is achieved, culture and development will naturally coalesce to create an environment in which all are valued, and eve…

Rarefied Islamophobia: When Americans Duplicate the European Cultural Talk

By Jocelyne Cesari

…tutions in Europe are facing many serious challenges. And yet even if this central assumption is true and Caldwell’s overall analysis of cultural and demographic evolution of Europe is correct, the author examines the questions within the primitive trappings of “The Green Peril.” Following a long list of European intellectuals such as Oriana Fallaci, Michel Houellebecq, and Caroline Forest, he argues that Europe is succumbing to an “Islamic cultur…

Transgender and Christian: Finding Identity

By Jori Lewis

…ty school. As a man, Robinson pastored a Baptist church in a small town in Central Texas. “We were in the kind of place where a pastor’s coming out, it would have been on the front page of the local paper,” she said. Robinson said that those congregants, nice and well-meaning as they were, would not have been comfortable with a transgender pastor. She worried about how the community’s reaction would affect her children. So when she made the decisi…

Republican Gomorrah Documents the Christian Right Takeover of the GOP

By Chip Berlet

…that surfs the waves of revolt isn’t just timely; it is, well, prophetic. Republican Gomorrah is a Jeremiad, and while some Republican partisans will naturally be outraged, others will nod their heads in agreement. Democrats are already rejoicing at the prospect of the Republican Jericho crumbling. Blumenthal spent years attending Christian Right events, tracking their leaders, and monitoring their media. The well-crafted book is packed with deta…

New Age Tragedy in Sedona: Non-Indians in the Sweat Lodge

By Johnny P. Flynn

…host Dance, and shares a foundation from Christian eschatology. One of the central myths of the Native American Church is how a twenty-foot-tall Jesus came to Earth and saw the treatment of Indian people and began to cry. Wherever the tears hit the ground peyote grew, and so the buttons of the hallucinogenic plant are called the “tears of Jesus,” and visions generated by eating these tears allow participants to “see what Jesus saw.” Understand, th…

The Man of Science vs. The Man of Faith: Richard Dawkins Spars with Stephen Colbert

By Byron R. McCane and Dan Mathewson

…atheism, Richard Dawkins, made an appearance on The Colbert Report, Comedy Central’s spoof of the Fox News-style, uber-conservative, pro-family values political commentary show. The purported reason for Dawkins’ visit was to discuss his newly released tome, The Greatest Show on Earth, a book that claims to reveal “the evidence for evolution,” as declared by the book’s subtitle. But for Stephen Colbert, the show’s faux-conservative bombast of a hos…

Jesus Goes to the Dark Carnival: Hell House Gets a Makeover?

By W. Scott Poole

…o die at the hands of their attackers. The one script that makes a woman a central figure (“Hannah’s Hope”) still makes her a victim. Hannah is dying of a brain tumor but not before God gives her one final grace: she gets to become Homecoming Queen of her high school. To quote from the official Judgement House Web site’s description of the narrative: “our homecoming Queen went home for eternity to be with her King, Jesus Christ.” In some respects,…

Suicide Bombers and the Prozac God: A Review of Dying for Heaven

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…cence, for instance—are also its most dangerous. While it may be easy to decode the thesis from a mere glance at the book’s title and subtitle, it’s not quite so easy to accept the premise. Dying for Heaven, released today, is at once conceptually misguided and systemically flawed; psychologizing religion in general and Islam in particular. Having mined myriad, often disparate sources, and writing from a lofty platform, the author is attempting to…