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Teaching World Religion in the Dumpster Fire

By Kate Blanchard

…whom would be triumphant, others grieving, all of them sleep-deprived. In truth, I did not trust myself to broach the topic of the election in front of 30 undergraduates, because I wasn’t certain I (also grieving, sleep-deprived, and prone to shooting off at the mouth) could rise above it just then. I was certain, however, that none of these impressionable young people deserved to see their professor come undone. As it happened, World Religions ca…

Be Careful What You Wish For: The Downside of Kicking the Russian Orthodox Church Out of the World Council of Churches

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ds everything. It does not believe that there is Orthodoxy; that there is Truth for which the Saints and Fathers struggled from the time of the Apostles.” Furthermore, many feared that participation in the WCC specifically suggested agreement with the decisions of other members of the council as they liberalized their views on gender and sexuality. Ultimately, two Orthodox jurisdictions, the Georgian Orthodox Church and the Bulgarian Orthodox Chur…

Is Cardinal Dolan’s Pro-Life Piece More Evidence of Pro-Catholic Bias from RNS Publisher?

By Evan Derkacz

…f RNS’ then-marketing director); and directly pushing coverage of Catholic stories—including to the the former editor-in-chief, whose “news judgement” was ultimately questioned for, as Jones wrote, “rejecting Gallagher’s ideas.” Given the scrutiny and incriminating details it’s all the more curious to look into a short op-ed RNS posted on June 8 in response to a piece by its own columnist, Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest. In it, Cardinal Tim…

Turn On The News: The Times Has to Make a Choice: It Can’t Laugh at Satanic Claims and Take the Christian Right at Face Value

By Daniel Schultz

…ose, and with the feeling that something was missing. My guess? About 1000 words, excised in an editing process run amok. One candidate for the stuff that wound up on the cutting room floor is any direct expression of the protestors’ perspective. Going back to playing devil’s advocate: What if they’re right? What if von Hausswolff’s music really is more appropriate for a “black mass” and has no business being played in a Catholic church? What if v…

Update: Fox News Tries Gotcha Game with Reza Aslan

By The Editors

… viral thanks to Buzzfeed, has boosted Aslan’s book sales considerably. According to the New York Times: On Friday, “Zealot” was in the No. 8 spot on Amazon.com, the nation’s biggest seller of books; by Sunday, it had hit No. 1. Random House is rushing to meet the surge in demand for the book. On Monday, the publisher ordered 50,000 copies, bringing the total to 150,000 copies in print by the end of the week. *** Credit must be given to Dr. Aslan…

The Avengers, Rogue Roombas, and Robot Accountability

By Hilary Ledwell and Michael Schulson

…ng symbol on his forehead, for another. (Okay, it’s a rock, not the Hebrew word for truth, as in some golem legends, but it’s close). And he’s created to protect the people from a terrifying outside force—very much in line with golem legends. Actually, the whole movie is weirdly similar to H. Leivick’s play The Golem, from the 1920s. HL: What happens in Leivick’s play? Who does the golem protect, and who is Red Dude protecting? Is there a similar…

Plant Porn and Physics Prayers

By Meera Subramanian

…ch column in Wired. Though he’s received some blessing from the scientific world—a geneticist at UC Berkeley, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and other notables were on the board of Keats’ International Association for Divine Taxonomy—his work more often gets called absurd. He takes this as a compliment. “Absurdity is the circus quality of profundity. Where things get deep and disturbing, laughter is the only reflexive response. I see…

No Buddhists in Washington?

By Danny Fisher

…the country that offer some kind of program in mindfulness meditation instruction. By running tests on and studies of longtime monastic practitioners, neurologists like the University of Wisconsin’s Richard Davidson are also beginning to scientifically verify Buddhist claims like that of the eighth-century pundit Shantideva: “All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself; all the happiness in the world comes from seeking…

Kendrick Lamar’s Hip-Hop Jeremiad

By Josiah Daniels

…ump into your arms Cut on the engine, then sped off in the rain I’m gone. Truly, as Brueggemann tells it, “the vocation of a prophet is [a] conflicted way to live.” We get some sense of this conflictedness when, despite his and his communities’ inconsolable reality of loss, Jeremiah imagines a real political Messiah who will rescue his people from imperial totalism (Jer. 23:5-6). This is the Messiah who, as womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant expr…

Why Conservatives are Turning on Beck

By Sarah Posner

…onstruct of government isn’t based on natural law and reason, but the construct is that the Qu’ran is the constitution and the clerics rule through oligarchy and lay Muslims have to abide by the clerical injunction of shari’ah.” Beck has never been shy about showcasing rapture-ready end-timers like Joel Rosenberg or John Hagee; his apocalyptic rantings about Islam of late are tinged with that sort of Ezekiel Gog-Magog prophecy — which, in the view…