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Virtual Book Burning and Its Consequences

By Laurie Patton

…s Story Books have always been symbolically powerful enough that their destruction touches us in ways that other forms of destruction do not. We hear perhaps more about the secular examples of book burning; the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang decreed that all books not belonging to his state be destroyed; the Roman Senate made a similar order about a book praising Brutus and Cassius after Caesar’s assassination; and Hitler and Stalin are among the m…

Why We Should Teach Theology in the Public University

By Jonathan Sheehan

…might end up hating Aristotle; another loving him, and the same would be true for Woolf, or Rawls, or any of the other powerful and world-shaping ideas we encounter. All of these outcomes are successes. Fundamentally, then, any theology appropriate to a public university would have to be released from Christian ownership, meaning from any Christian monopoly on the idea. Let’s provisionally imagine a new idea, then. Let’s call theology that conste…

Well, the Harris-Trump Debate Happened — Now Enjoy Your Freedom and Choose Wisely

By Mary Rambaran-Olm

…4-sentence plan that Harris is copying, and it’s based on the classic book Run, Spot, Run. “Take a look at her plan. She doesn’t have a plan.” Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are basically the new Riggs and Murtaugh of DC because they’re gun owners. Harris’ “girl, what?” face was unstoppable. Trump is actually pleased that Harris is Black and doesn’t really care either way. Trump had more zingers than people will give him credit for, partic…

Discrimination on the Taxpayer’s Dime? The Fight To Curtail the Overreach of RFRA

By Sarah Posner

…in employment. A Christian organization may hire only Christians, in other words, if it so chooses—as is the case with World Vision, one of the biggest faith-based charitable organizations in the country. According to the memo, “a faith-based grantee’s hiring preference for staff who share its religious identity and mission must be permitted” if the grantee’s services provided under the contract constitute an exercise of its religion and it “demon…

Is Bill Barr’s Belief in a Powerful President Actually Religious? A ‘High Papal’ Fable

By Ivan Strenski

…ious consciousness—a “new and momentous understanding.” In contrast to the world of ‘winners,’ the crucified Christ proclaimed that God sided with ‘losers.’ Christ, cast in his “loneliness and nakedness and persecution” paradoxically promised that through these sufferings the “savior had redeemed” humanity. In effect, “the new suffering Christ made Christians aware that God was closer to the weak and poor than to the mighty and rich”—a truly absur…

What This All-Star Christian Movie Gets Wrong About Christianity

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…lping its viewers discern the differences between its movie-version of the world, and the world they live in. And that’s a big deal precisely because of the sort of movie it is. It’s not escapism or fantasy or documentary—that’s why criticisms about it being “preachy” are a little silly. It is, though, a movie pretty clearly intended to make Christians act a certain way toward the world they share with others. The deceit comes when “Do You Believe…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…onalisms. Our new frightening politics motivated by similar fears and irrationalities, the ever-present specter of climate change and environmental collapse, the terrifying possibilities and hope of technology—all serve to turn our world upside down as the Strasbourgeois world had been. Where then is our Carnival? Or will we, like the dancers of Strasbourg, perform a paradoxical mimicry of the thing, horrible and twisted, before the long Lent of w…

Simon Critchley, Atheist Religious Thinker on Utopia & the Fiction of Faith

By Beatrice Marovich

…m I make in the first part of Faith of the Faithless is that the political world is a world of fictions, which I see as a completely uncontroversial claim. The realm of politics is a realm of fictions. And we need to see these fictions for the fictions that they are, by examining their history and doing a kind of anthropology of those fictions. That’s one claim. The question I then ask is: might there be a fiction in which we could still nonethele…

“Of Kings and Prophets” Producers—a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew—Refuse to Sanitize the Bible

By Reza Aslan, Bill Collage and Adam Cooper

…now this better than anyone. Today, often with far less at stake, people struggle to stay true to their faith when confronted by the expediency of simply getting through the day. In David’s world, each of these character’s choices had outsized consequences—so much so that we still study them 3,000 years later. For each of us, we are devoted to our respective faiths, and passionate about our artistry. That’s why we are convinced that if the enterta…

Lying about Santa: The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

By Nathan Schneider

…ildren only became firmer in their self-assurance. Set against the general run of their ruminations, Hook’s history can only described as revisionist. Reminiscent of the internet cult-phenomenon Zeitgeist’s treatment of Jesus, it featured the standard ingredients of a turn-your-world-upside-down debunking. Before Santa Claus became Baby Jesus’ materialistic sidekick, we learned, he passed through a sequence of incarnations and permutations that go…