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The Sacred and the Dead: ‘Ripple’ Is a Spiritual Manifesto

By Jim Burklo

…n to the sky by a fountain not made by the hands of men. We spun around to look in the wides of each other’s eyes, mouths agape with awe, hair tossed wild, overwhelmed by the unmistakable, ineffable reality of Something Larger—an emergent property not reducible to the band, the crowd, or anything mortal. “Ripple,” penned by the band’s chief lyricist and official fifth member, Robert Hunter, is the Grateful Dead’s Psalm 23—its spiritual manifesto,…

American Nuns and the Vatican: More Pain than Promise

By Mary E. Hunt

…e sitting pretty for the future. Her members’ median age, she claimed (the numbers are disputed by some experts) is twenty years younger than the national average (53 versus 70+). Her sisters are encouraged to embrace a self-less spirituality in which, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20). It is religious life as the Vatican would have it. For all the feel-good efforts of the day, this presentation gave me the dist…

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

By Jeff Sharlet

…is. “We’re being invaded by foreign armies of all different countries.” He looks like he’s wearing a disguise. A bucket hat and shades and a long-sleeved gray t-shirt, an outfit designed to be anonymous. He looks like Slenderman undercover. “It’ll break out in violence,” he says matter-of-factly, as if bloodshed were just tomorrow’s weather. Chris, in a bucket hat. But one of the first speakers, “television personality” Wayne Allyn Root, a Jewish…

Lying Boldly: Louise Hay and the Problem of Religious Science

By Peter Laarman

…laimed the “inseparable oneness of God and Man.” Let us then have a closer look at the one huge family tree, starting with the observations of the great William James, speaking here in his 1901-1902 Gifford Lectures about what he called “Mind-cure” spiritualism: It is an optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of c…

Keep Jews Interesting: It’s Time to Stop Being Defined by Anti-Semitism

By Shaul Magid

…bout their lives in a state of what one might call low anxiety—perhaps the best we can hope for—are suddenly awakened when some professor inadvertently and jokingly refers to a public figure, who happens to be a Jew, as a bedbug, followed shortly after by the publication of a book about how anti-Semitism on the left, masquerading as anti-Israelism, is more dangerous than anti-Semitism on the right captured on video including the chant “Jews will n…

Is Christianity Greening? Depends On Who (and How) You Ask

By Daniel Schultz

…t two decades of advocacy have not made Christians any greener in their outlooks. The study, a longitudinal look at Gallup’s annual surveys on the environment, reveals that Christians have not become more concerned about the environment, and in some cases have become less so. Caveats are in order: the author of the paper was not able to separate evangelical Christians from other Protestants (Gallup doesn’t make those distinctions). Nor could the d…

Mormon Statement on Feminism is Relevant and Timely… But Only by Coincidence

By Holly Welker

…to create content for its teenage members? Why is the church so anxious to look like it’s somehow the one entity on earth that isn’t responsive to its environment? Even rocks can crack under extreme temperatures, be crushed by bigger rocks, or worn smooth by water. But somehow, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn’t notice what’s going with feminism unless a teenager sends a question about it to the church’s magazine? The answer,…

In Vitro v. Dignitas Personae: Teacher Fired for Fertility Treatment Sues Diocese

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…Rev. Sparks explains, Catholic moral theology has a longstanding habit of looking at reproduction in terms of wombs and sperm, and male and female genitals, and what God is believed to have made them for: what they are “ordered to,” in Catholic parlance, quite apart from anyone’s feelings on the subject. This isn’t surprising, really, when you consider that a big part of the Catholic tradition was formed before modernity; before the invention of…

Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence

By Michael Jerryson

…l activism which was going to be the topic of my dissertation. Rather than look to archives, I decided to speak with Buddhist monks and nuns on the ground. I interviewed monks protecting the forests from big business and villagers from dangerous pesticides; I met and began to chronicle the activities of the first fully ordained Thai Buddhist nun, Dhammananda Bhikkuni; and I met with Thai Buddhist monastic intellectuals. Military Monks Then in Janu…

So You’ve Decided to Run for Senate Against a Pro Wrestling Mogul

By Dan Mathewson

…news might introduce candidate Perry as the Governor of Texas, but when I look at him, I see a campaign-trail version of WWE superstar J.B.L., with his big-talking, big-folksy, big-Texas ways. The broadcasters might introduce candidate Bachmann as a Minnesota Congresswoman, but to me, she looks like the WWE’s Vicky Guerrero, whose own rise to power teetered toward mad-hatter craziness. Candidate Romney might be the ex-Governor of Massachusetts, b…