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When Religion Becomes a Trap Rather Than a Safety Net

By Holly Welker

…it for herself. Tell me about responses you’ve gotten from people who have read Hippie Boy. The truth about your personal story is, until you start telling it, you think you’re alone, and then you realize, this is commonplace. My situation isn’t isolated to Mormonism. But to suggest that it doesn’t exist in Mormonism is just bullshit. Abuse of power happens in every religion. And when you give someone absolute power, absolute power corrupts. That…

How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish, and Unhappy

By David Webster

…g matches between theists and atheists that fill so many books, internet forums, and newspaper columns. I think that both groups have rather overlooked the ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ and the rather distinctive issues that surround these approaches. I also wanted to demonstrate, albeit briefly, that even though someone may be an atheist, they may find more to inspire them in the depth of some conventional religions (while utterly rejecting their…

Reality as Revelation: “Hail Caesar!” is the Coen Brothers’ Most Religious Movie Yet

By Elijah Siegler

…lissa Wilkinson, the film critic for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, who saw the film as a passion play and perceptively noted that the whole film was “structured like one of the most enduringly popular genres: the biblical epic, the “Greatest Story Ever Told,” the archetypal tale of suffering and redemption.” Like Denys Arcand’s 1989 film Jesus of Montreal, Hail, Caesar!’s main character has a job that involves creating a Jesus story…

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…lieve them just because I was taught them (which I had been), or because I read them in a book written by a lama (which I was doing). I believed them because I had found them to be true in my own experience. Which is strange, because I’m not a Buddhist. Not only that, but I’m not into blending things. I’m kind of a purist. I like my wine red, my coffee black, my M&M’s plain, and my religious traditions separate. I hold to the principle that if one…

Muslim Stowaways
on the European
Titanic: “Eurabian” Alarmism 2.0

By Haroon Moghul

…dents of Muslim violence together to present a grand narrative of Islamic brutality, there is a Middle Easterner or South Asian who links Iraqi sanctions, Condoleezza Rice’s cruel “birth pangs of a new Middle East,” and ongoing drone strikes to paint a parallel picture of an essentially violent West. The sad fact is, many people are untroubled by violence or extremism, except if it affects them, their interests, or those considered “like” themselv…

A Daily Utopia: Creating Our Moral Values Every Day

By Anna Peterson

…universal ethic? This is an enduring dilemma for ethicists. Habits of the Heart suggests that our culture has a deeply rooted “expressive individualism” that can be an alternative to the utilitarian individualism which they find both widespread and destructive. I think they’re right, but I also think our culture and our practices give us some other resources, equally deeply rooted and even more deeply hidden, which can be sources of non-individual…

Preaching to the ‘Moveable Middle’: Bishop Gene Robinson on Marriage Equality and the Election

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. As someone who has faced these questions a million times as well, when I read books like this I’m always reading with the “yeah, but…” point of view. You say you’re trying to answer questions from good and loving people, but my cynicism says, “Yeah, but, what about the fanatics who aren’t good and loving? What do we say to them, or do we even say anything to them?” They are not my target audience. I’ve had enough contact with people who are so f…

Historian Matthew Stewart Upends the Widespread Belief that 19th Century U.S. Christianity Was On ‘The Right Side of History’

By Peter Laarman

…ll Phillips, etc.—not to mention fearless Black Christians like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and so many others. John Brown poses a special challenge for Stewart, as Brown was obviously a serious Bible believer and by far the most passionate of the White abolitionists. In order to square these facts with his broader thesis Stewart suggests that Brown can’t really be counted as a Christian because his…

Why Christians Should Not Host Their Own Passover Seders

By Rebecca Cynamon-Murphy

…y forget that in 2,000 years, Judaism has changed quite a bit from what we read about in Acts. (For instance, although Jesus would have celebrated Passover, he did not celebrate it with the type of seder that is commonly hosted today.) And any knowledge we gain of ancient Judaism does not translate automatically to knowledge of modern-day Jewish people. So, we come to equate “Jewish” in our minds with dudes in robes and scarfed women carrying bask…

‘Hello, Trump Warriors!’ Little-Known Preachers and Rabble Rousers are the Unregulated Id of the Felon’s First Rally

By Jeff Sharlet

…a herds itself at every Trump rally, too lazy to rethink the old political rules Trump’s gamed to turn them into a prop—“and say, ‘he said a horrible thing.’” The crowd laughs. It’s funny, if you’re a Trumper, because it’s true. It’s a subtle move, because it is true, all of it at once: the felon does not care; and he says what he says to bait the press; and the press will take the bait (as I write, I hear MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace repeating the bai…