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The Sacred and the Dead: Three Ways to American Beauty

By Aaron K. Kerr

…we can engage the Dead via participation. The Dead Metaphor Mystic poets renew culture through words. Robert Hunter, one of the Dead’s chief lyricists, plays a solo show in Philadelphia in the 1980s. Photo by David Saddler via flickr Robert Hunter, the lyricist who worked on almost all the songs on American Beauty, is a poet who has translated Rainer Maria Rilke from the German (the Duino Elegies). Rilke, a contemporary of Nietzsche, also wrote Th…

The Dangerous Fact About QAnon Believers That Reporters Fail to Grasp

By John Stoehr

…prep schools and the Ivy League before moving to Manhattan to work at the Times is vulnerable to media representations of rural life, because they’re media representations created by and for other elites. Fact is, when rural Arizonans talk about “law enforcement” over a plate of eggs and bacon, what they mean is punishing the weak. When they talk about their “liberty,” what they mean is their dominance. When they talk about their “traditional val…

Meet the Real Mitt Romney

By Joanna Brooks

The Sunday New York Times‘s front-page story on Mitt Romney’s service as a Mormon lay pastoral leader is hands down the most humanizing profile of candidate Romney that I’ve yet seen. And it makes a substantial contribution towards improving a national conversation about Mormonism that continues to fixate on caricatures and pejoratives. (A week after Pastor Robert Jeffress went on a media-spree hurling the pejorative term “cult” at millions of Am…

For Many Christian Zionists, Israeli Protesters are a Threat to God’s Plan

By Aidan Orly

…, including Jesus’ Second Coming. The International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ)—one of the largest and most influential Christian Zionist organizations in the world—takes a somewhat more “both-sides” approach. While acknowledging that Netanyahu has been rushing his judicial reforms and leaving little room for broad consensus, David Parsons, ICEJ Vice President & Senior Spokesman, also blames the protests, specifically calling out reservi…

Will ‘Pandemic Time’ Save Us From the Inhuman and Destructive Demands of ‘Fossil-Fuel Time’?

By Whitney Bauman

…the fossil-fueled time that takes humans “out of this world,” and re-ground them in these ambiguous, multiple, planetary times, we can begin to think about and co-construct post-pandemic worlds that are more about the flourishing and resilience of the entire planetary community….

Blessed With a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch’s Spiritual Strivings

By Paul Harvey

…cate guitar work, and exact diction—the kind (as Nate Chinen writes in the New York Times) that makes poetry seem like plain speech? The languid, almost unbearable restraint of the music, particularly on this latest recording, constantly strains against the mythically dark stories of the characters’ individual lives. The understated, even mannered, songs tell hyperbolic character tales. In “Tennessee,” a girl-gone-wrong song, a gentle guitar and s…

Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

By Elesha Coffman

…time of its announced closing, but it was losing $133,000 a month. Andover-Newton’s campus alone was assessed at $43 million, but trustees deemed its future as a free-standing institution unsustainable. Rich endowments can stave off the inevitable so long that, when closure comes, it feels sudden rather than inevitable. At the board meeting that determined Episcopal Divinity School’s fate, the (non-voting) student and faculty representatives entre…

The Real Reasons Why Evangelical Embrace of Environmentalism Lags

By Sarah Posner

…ligent design are beginning to use the same tactics they’ve used in their crusade against teaching environmentalism in schools to teaching climate change, including calls to “teach the controversy” — even though, just as with evolution, there is absolutely no scientific controversy, but rather agreement. Now that would be a story: evangelical environmentalists going toe-to-toe with the climate change deniers who are out to teach kids that climate…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…ilogy as a parable of adolescence and its struggles. But, Collins told the New York Times Magazine in a rare interview, “I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.” The idea for the series came to Collins while she was watching TV. On one channel, there was a reality TV show. On the other, there was footage from the Iraq War. Ergo, the basic premise, which is a kind of Theseus-and-the-Minotaur/“Survivor”/Gladiator mashup:…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…weeks or months, but for decades, to satisfy this God into not burning me alive? I might live Islamically, but just for a few days, and thereafter I’d give in to temptations my Islam had no room for, my religious education gave me no means to comprehend, and my sense of the divine gave me no slack to grapple with. Islam left me crumpled in otherworldly exhaustion, the spiritual effort to be Muslim wearying me like no physical exertion ever could….