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The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Humans

…dy had printed out, has been changed. Instead of arriving in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia at around 9:30 p.m., I arrive around 7:00 p.m. The travel agent said this change was required from the Saudi end; thus my flight into Jeddah from Paris had to be changed. But in order to make this two-hour adjustment, I lost my direct flight to Paris. The difference is, instead of leaving in the evening on Sunday, my departure time is 8:45 a.m. Not such a big deal or…

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The “Nones” Are Here… And Have Been for Over 100 Years

…t as today, religious leaders wondered what they could do to stop the flow away from church or synagogue. Recognizing that many were leaving religion because its doctrines no longer matched their modern views or sympathies, some like-minded leaders sought to create new traditions. One such movement was the Society for Ethical Culture, founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, a Reform Jew who created a post-Jewish religion of “deed rather than creed.” The S…

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Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

What inspired you to write Ecce Homo? As part of a completely separate research project, I stumbled across Wilson Yates’ article on the religious significance of Francis Bacon’s paintings which led me to a reproduction of Bacon’s Painting (1946), which led me to catalogues of Bacon’s work. I was absolutely enraptured by their difficult beauty. I was curious about my reaction to them, about why I was so taken by these paintings when many friends h…

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With the Pope at Ground Zero

…e Francis went for an walk alongside the north pool of the 9/11 Memorial Plaza to meet with ten families who lost loved ones at the twin towers and to participate in an interfaith service with over 600 religious leaders from the New York area. We have come a long way from 2001, but the hurt and pain remained in the faces of many present, including Tim Rogér of Rochester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines

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Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

…evelation, for example—as metaphorical. Thus, the Qur’an promises that in Paradise, there will be gardens, running water, and ripe fruits. The righteous will be clad in silk and recline on couches, ready to be waited on and to receive the attention of houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to t…

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Does Religion Still Matter?

…t 7pm—Central time—I’ll be joining a panel at Marquette University’s Islam Awareness Week. (This is an occasion during which Muslim students attempt to draw one’s awareness to parts of Islam one is unaware of. It’s like getting to know the neighbor you might not wish you had.) The topic for the panel is ‘Does Religion Still Matter?’ (Cramer 004E, if that means anything to you.) Before I tell you how I decided to answer, let me describe some other…

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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…Your Fault, a series on blame in contemporary society by RD’s The Cubit.   AA: Is it fair to say that the psychological mechanisms we use for blaming are tuned for judging human individuals? BM: Yes. Because that’s the only place, and the only context, in which we can actually learn this. The way my research group has thought for a while about how blame emerges developmentally and gets refined in the course of growing up in a community, is really…

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Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

…chedule interviews. I don’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion t…

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Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

…ired from Fuller and moved to Colorado Springs! I felt like I worked at a catalog call-in center. Seriously. I would never have expected to be talking about Wagner in conjunction with the 2012 election cycle, but here goes: C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran Professor of Church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary when I was there as a student in the early 1990s. He had had a career on the mission field in South America before coming to Full…

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Space X and the Photo-Op: Trump’s Use of the Bible Was Just the Latest in a Series of Christian Nationalist Messages

…front of St. John’s church in Washington, DC on June 1st. Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham and head of the Samaritan’s Purse organization, tweeted that “the word of God…is sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12). Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress declared that Trump held up the Bible because it teaches that God “hates lawlessness,” echoing verses like 1 John 3:4 (“Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness”) an…

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