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Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You Wouldn’t Know it From the Media

By Chrissy Stroop

…religious do not deserve to be taken seriously. This brings us back to the new secular media project, OnlySky. Founded by Silicon Valley tech veteran Shawn Hardin, who now acts as its CEO, OnlySky already boasts an impressive group of contributors who are well known in secular circles. These include Pitzer College Professor Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist whose books on lived secularism are highly valued in the atheist and humanist communities. Spea…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…ew thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy critique I’d developed of Deepak…

On Rick Santorum’s Piety: “Torquemada Was, in that Sense, a Model Catholic”

By The Editors

Writing at the New York Review of Books today (in a post that deserves a full read), Garry Wills offers what should be the final word on Santorum’s backward-facing faithiness : Rick Santorum is a nice smiley fanatic. He does not believe in evolution or global warming or women in the workplace. He equates gay sex with bestiality (Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum). He equates contraception with the guillotine. Only a brain-dead party could think him a wo…

Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating

By Beatrice Marovich

…speaking, vegetables get all the glory,” Ariel Kaminer lamented in the New York Times, playing the role of the paper’s esteemed Ethicist. And so, in an attempt to buck this trend the paper launched an essay contest in March of this year: in search of the ethical argument for meat. Essays were judged by a star-studded panel that included vocal vegetarians like Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer as well as more cautiously omnivorous foodies such…

Attacking Obama on Religion and Race? Worst Romney Strategy Ever.

By Joanna Brooks

The New York Times set a fire yesterday with its report that a GOP Super Pac developed plans to resurrect controversy over Barack Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright in order to sabotage the Democratic National Convention in September and the Obama re-election campaign. A plan produced under the oversight of Republican strategist (and one-time Jon Huntsman guru) Fred Davis and funded by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts threatened to focu…

The Zeitgeist Debate

By Sarah Posner

…spicions were poetically accurate — the bankers met secretly because they knew any proposal identified as Wall Street’s bill would be doomed in the Democratic House of Representatives. After the section on the Fed, amid a jumble of claims that veer from World War II to Vietnam to the Patriot Act to an indictment of Fox News, including superimposing Howard Beale’s rant from Network over an image of Rupert Murdoch, the film also links the Bush famil…

Freeman Dyson, American Heretic

By Michael J. Altman

…heretic. Nicholas Dawidoff’s profile of the brilliant physicist in the New York Times Magazine illuminates a man who has always sought to subvert scientific consensus—most recently in denying the dangers of climate change and CO2 emissions. The story’s title, “The Civil Heretic,” signals the ghost of religion hanging in the background. It is the “secular religion of environmentalism” that Dyson opposes. A religion that holds the plant itself sacre…

Experimental Theater Meets Experimental Faith: The Wooster Group’s “Early Shaker Spirituals”

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…y members still performing after 39 years, as one of the best actresses in New York, and wondered at her decision not to work with other companies. It certainly doesn’t seem to bother her any. In Early Shaker Spirituals (which ends its successful run on June 15th) Valk steps further away from the spotlight by acting as director. Like the Sabbathday Lake Shaker site, which is both a religious community, museum, and shop, The Wooster Group has also…

Loving the Lonely Polygamist

By Joanna Brooks

…disdain or distaste for polygamy. The most glaring example: last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, wherein reviewer Eric Weinberger feels obliged to denounce polygamy as a “culturally alien and abhorrent practice” and concludes by wishing that Brady had shown “a little less respect” for his protagonist Golden Richards and his four wives. Huh? I wrote Brady and asked him for his reaction: [Weinberger] thinks that I’m not clear-eyed or cr…

What to Wear When Praying with the Pope

By Donna Schaper

…tion in a more meaningful context, as he does with regard to the death penalty. He doesn’t seem to know how to nag or scold. For me? I found something to wear with my collar. And have renewed gratitude for the yoke the collar implies. Forty years ordained, I never thought I’d be renewed by a pope or the Pope. And guess what? I am….