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Exclusive: Why Did Chicago Public Schools Just Quietly Drop Transcendental Meditation?

By Aryeh Siegel

…n-profit called Cheetah House, which is affiliated with Brown University, Harvard, and a number of other prestigious institutions, exists to provide “information and resources about meditation-related difficulties to meditators-in-distress.” And this is a major part of the mission of a proponent of meditation. In addition, while the UK’s National Health Service notes that meditation can be very helpful in many cases, “The serious, long-lasting nat…

Charleston Killings: This is What a Sin Against the Holy Spirit Looks Like

By Peter Laarman

…ll houses of worship are sanctuaries, but the concept of sanctuary holds particular resonance in Black Church tradition on account of the church’s role as the one institution white people could not take completely away from the persons whom they never ceased to abuse in the most un-Christian ways imaginable. It is nevertheless true that the original African Church in Charleston was burned to the ground by whites following a major 1822 slave upris…

White Supremacy, Mental Illness, or Society: What’s to Blame for Religious Violence?

By Michael Schulson

…Charlie Hebdo Murders,” in which he explained that: The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action….They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West…They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve p…

Aliens, Nanobots, & Microbes: The Science of Secular Apocalypse

By Michael Schulson

…human extinction. You get things like Ray Kurzweil’s techno-rapture Singularitarianism [in which a superintelligence emerges and technological growth outpaces human understanding]. And then you get this new field of existential risk studies, where the conclusions are not dissimilar in many ways to a lot of the religious views. You know, there’s going to be some sort of catastrophic event in the future, perhaps we might even survive it, but we’ll…

Leaving Empire: The Risks of American Insularity

By Ryann Croken

…falling in love. “Travel is a two-way transaction,” he observes, “and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another.” This compelling illumination is founded upon the commonsense philosophy that befriending someone often makes it more difficult to kill them. Collateral damage becomes murder if you love, in an Iyerian sense, the collateral. And so, what travel can do to prevent war (or, at the very least, what travel can do…

Devil’s Bookmark: How Not to Defend God

By Bernard Schweizer

…onclusion that the “ancient Near East” was so collectively corrupted that barbarisms abounded. Here’s Timothy Beal about the socio-cultural context from which the Old Testament arose: “Nor do we know very much for certain about the ancient life situations—ritual practices, oral traditions, legal systems—in which these texts had their beginnings.” Sounds a bit more humble than Copan’s assertions about the “fallen” state of “the ancient Near East.”…

Ebola and Us: The American Roots of Liberia’s Trauma

By Peter Laarman

…hristian perfectionism gone badly wrong. It owes its existence and the primary arc of its history to an ambitious enterprise called the American Colonization Society. A pivotal early figure was an energetic Congregationalist named Samuel John Mills. Mills was a prime mover in the creation of the American Bible Society in 1816 and also in the formation of the Colonization Society the following year. In 1818 Mills made sail for Africa to spy out the…

The Return of Christian Terrorism

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…a assassin, saying that he acted with “righteousness and mercy.” Several years earlier, another member of Bray’s network of associates, Rachelle (“Shelly”) Shannon, a housewife from rural Oregon, had also attacked Dr. George Tiller as he drove away from his clinic in Wichita. She was arrested for attempted murder. When I interviewed Bray on several occasions in the 1990s, he provided a theological defense of this kind of violence from two differen…

Can Art Save Us From Fundamentalism?

By Philip S. Francis

…damentalist side of evangelical Christianity,” as one alumnus puts it. The arts are often at the very center of the stories they tell. My second field site is the Bob Jones University School of Fine Arts. This dynamic art school, founded in 1947, is housed at the self-described “fundamentalist” Christian university in Greenville, South Carolina. It has the largest faculty of any of the university’s schools, and it is famed for its world-class Shak…

Dear Timothy Keller: The “Evangelical” Problem isn’t Pollsters

By Jessica Johnson

…ice without the support of, and often in struggles against, so many white E/evangelicals? And why doesn’t Keller just come out and say that white E/evangelicals may want to rethink the relationships between their theology and politics in lieu of casting ballots in such large numbers for the likes of Trump and Moore? Instead of performing linguistic gymnastics in order to save face, and relying on others to do the work of renewal, Keller should ope…