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Where Christianity and Islam Collide

By Maggie Fick

…undary between the religions, Griswold suggests that “exclusive claims on truth tend to call forth their opposites.” In other words, there is hope that extremism will be contested by the moderates of both faiths. Griswold quotes a Malaysian activist who works for a local NGO protecting women’s legal rights who told her: “Moderates can no longer afford to be silent.” By consistently referencing the geographical aspects of life along the tenth paral…

A Boundary-Busting Memoir of Love, Mental Illness, and Being Muslim in America

By Haroon Moghul

…l obsession, but it’s also deeply disturbing. Yes, ISIS is dangerous and, true, Muhammad Ali meant a lot to America, but we exaggerate the role and influence of Islam in the world, at great cost. We’re ignoring income inequality, the failure of our education system—what else explains our inability to have a meaningful national conversation about anything from gender to science—climate change, Russia, China, and a thousand other things beside, just…

You Are What You Eat: New Book on Cannibalism Reimagines What It Means to Be Made of Flesh

By Michael Schulson

…on. They kill him, and their servant makes curries from the boy’s flesh. Ciruttontar serves this meal to the god, who invites him to sit down and eat—and then demands that Ciruttontar call his son to join them for supper. Powerless and confused, the devotee goes outside to call for the boy, at which point Shiva disappears, the child is reconstituted and restored to his parents, and the god reveals himself to them in his full divine form. What can…

Jesus in 3D: The Shroud of Turin Meets the 21st Century

By Peter Manseau

…an, naked, prepared for the grave—the Shroud serves as a reminder that the stories of religion are first of all stories of human lives. To wade into the murky waters surrounding the Shroud and its history is immediately to contend with conspiracy theories both grand and mundane. The recently discovered document puts the Shroud briefly in the hands of a controversial band of crusading knights. According to the text (uncovered by Vatican researcher…

Now That ‘Serial’ is Over: 2014’s Best Podcasts about Religion

By Andrew Aghapour

…erwise difficult experiences. RISK! by Kevin Allison asks people to “tell true stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public,” and it has quickly become the podcast of record for deep, dark secrets. “Into the Mystic” is a collection of three stories about mystical experiences and crises of faith. It’s also a great introduction to the power of storytelling. The second runner up, You Made It Weird, is ostensibly a comedy podcast where st…

Taking the Economy Back From the Elites: Blessed Are the Organized

By Nathan Schneider

…onto the end of a systemic power analysis. I would have to begin with the stories I was hearing and remain grounded in stories throughout. In the winter of 2007, I led another seminar for IAF organizers and leaders, this one in Houston, and again went out into various communities to see what contemporary grassroots democracy looks like on the ground. The most important stops on that trip were in New Orleans, 16 months after Katrina, and in the Ri…

The Transfiguration of the Fanboy: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, The Conclusion

By Mark Dery

…er. They are books written decades after the fact by authors who had heard stories about Jesus from the oral tradition, stories that had been altered and even made up over time. There were lots of discrepancies in these stories, and the Gospel writers themselves changed them as they saw fit.[8] It gets worse: we don’t even have the original fanzines in which these heavily embroidered tributes to a long-dead idol originally appeared. “Not only do w…

Should Faith Healing ‘Do Business’ with Modern Medicine?

By Beatrice Marovich

…elds like neuroscience, but she takes miracle stories like this seriously. Stories, she says, “get under our skin,” almost like a virus or bacteria. She warns her undergraduate students that, in order to do well in her course, they’ll need to take reports of demonic possession seriously as well. More, she sees these miraculous accounts embedded within medical science itself. The suggestive power of healing—merely through hopeful belief—has long op…

Conservative Christians Get in Touch with Feminist Side in Islamophobia

By Julie Ingersoll

…llection of short stories by Hemingway on gender imbalance he writes, “the stories are haunting, demonstrating the brutality that comes to men without the presence of women—and especially without the companionship of wives.” Right, I forget, in patriarchal fundamentalist Christianity, women do exist to serve men and facilitate men’s exercise of dominion (first their fathers’ and then their husbands’). So the question of what happens to them (men)…

Beyond Retribution: Bin Laden’s Death in its Cosmic Context

By Eric Reitan

…rospect of dropping our delusions and rationalizations. But sometimes the truth thrusts itself at us in ways we can’t ignore, driving us towards realizations we’d rather flee. Often this is what victim-offender dialogue achieves, bringing offenders face-to-face with the reality of what they’ve done, making it so real they can’t hide from it anymore. And so, as I thought about how I would sentence Timothy McVeigh, I envisioned something analogous t…