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Is Liberalism Islamic?: An Interview with Mustafa Akyol

By Haroon Moghul

…holar said that there is a problem of “illiberal moderates” in the Islamic world. That is the problem that I am really focusing on. You have a lot of reach in Turkey. And of course, Islam in Turkey is increasingly seizing the world’s attention. From your perspective, how do you see Islam in Turkey right now? What are you pleased with, and what are you worried about? Of course, we Turks still have lots of problems with our own politics and culture….

Atheists and Christians Compete to Give More

By Lauri Lebo

…page posted a response: “If r/Christianity builds a hospital in the Third world, we are going to build 10! Let the X-mas Wars and the overall battle for goodness in the world begin!” On Dec. 9, a member of the atheist group set up a fundraising page for the group Doctors Without Borders on the charitable donation site FirstGiving.com. Crymes, after encouraging members of the Christian group to donate to the atheists’ campaign, created her own Fir…

Creationism and Evolution are Competing ‘Myths’

By Kelly E. Hayes

…bility for a particular audience, for whom it functions as a paradigmatic truth. A particular type of discourse, myth constructs and naturalizes its authority by appealing to some sacred or transcendent realm that is ostensibly beyond the petty interests of individuals. Unlike most other types of discourse, myth is able to engender shared feelings of belonging and purpose among its audience, making it an effective sociopolitical instrument. Hence…

Delillo and Doctor Strange: Orientalist Fantasy is Alive and Well

By Noah Berlatsky

…Strange. Zero K alternately mocks and hopes for a better, more meaningful world, where limits are conquered and spiritual truths fall gently like clumps of yak hair. And that better, more meaningful world, mocked or hoped for, is couched, again and again, in terms of a half-acknowledged Eastern mysticism. “I recall the taxi driver kneeling in the gutter slime, turned toward Mecca,” Jeffrey muses profoundly, “and I try to reconcile the firm placem…

Peter Berger, Sociology’s Defender of God (1929-2017)

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…o provide. Again, religion was at the heart of Berger’s thinking about the world, including the global world of our 21st century era. In the lead essay for a book on Religion in Global Civil Society that I edited, Berger notes that “whether civil or uncivil, there can be no doubt that religion today is being globalized to an unprecedented degree” (p15). Trying to make sense of this new reality, like the many social realities that fascinated him ov…

A far-right protestor wears a MAGA tophat with a grim expression.

Conservative Evangelicals Aren’t Hypocrites, They’re Sadists

By Daniel Schultz

…an imperfect instrument of God’s work to maintain the sacred order of the world. The cruelty is indeed the point because the cruelty manifests the justice that maintains the proper order. So how do you counteract all of this? Arguments from reason don’t work—they’re working from a different mental model. Arguments from values don’t work—they don’t share the same values, or at least not in the same way. Arguments from identity don’t work—they don’…

Books to Give this Holiday Season to Help Understand the World We’ve Found Ourselves in (and to Help Reimagine a Better One)

By Becky Garrison

…for National Policy, whose membership list reads like a who’s who in the Trump administration. Shameless: A Sexual Reformation (Convergent Books) by Nadia Bolz-Weber For that holy hipster friend in search of a new kind of a/theistic Christianity who doesn’t want to go back and read the works of Phyllis Trible, John Boswell, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, bell hooks, and other pioneering scholars who’ve written on the intersection of human sexualit…

Why Virginia Governor’s ‘God is Everywhere’ Statement isn’t a Simple Answer to Those Who Want to Worship Together

By Karen E. Park

…tion which is shamanistic and animistic. In Hmong cosmology, the spiritual world and the material world are linked in complex ways, and the shaman works on behalf of the community to restore health, harmony, and to keep good relations with the ancestors (for an excellent documentary on a Hmong shaman from Appleton named Paja Thao see The Split Horn.) Hmong funerals, at which the entire community gathers to help the soul of the deceased person find…

Did the Dalai Lama Just Call for an End to Religion?

By Richard Schiffman

…e, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.” It is easy to sympathize with the Dalai Lama’s frustration. After millennia of being preached at by priests and prophets, humanity is still addicted to war…

In Praise of Failure: Is Defining Religion Such a Good Idea?

By Ivan Strenski

…Linker by thinking more about religion as something we “cut out” from our world. “Religion” names something we choose to distinguish amid the impressions we have of our world. Now, the question is what criteria should we use to decide what will distinguish it? What Linker has done, without perhaps being aware of it, is to have chosen, to have decided, that norms, practices establishing a comprehensive way of life, based upon revelation, mystical…