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The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Humans

By Amina Wadud

…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…

Shukr: Gratitude

By Amina Wadud

…day off. I didn’t cook, but instead picked up something from my favorite Naan and Curry place. I didn’t venture out at night to the tarawih prayer. What’d you think, I was a saint? Nope, just a real person, attempting to do what is best. Yesterday what was best was to go easy on myself. As I get older with the fasting, I get more challenged by the routine. I don’t know why it took me so long to see it, but about four years ago, I realized one thi…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

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…

With the Pope at Ground Zero

By Anthea Butler

…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…

Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers

By Eric Reitan

…rest? Back in January of 2007, a colleague gave me a photocopied page from a book and asked me to evaluate it as if it were a student paper. The page contained a summary and cursory criticism of the first three of Aquinas’ “Five Ways” (arguments for proving the existence of a transcendent being). As I looked it over, I noticed that the author got Aquinas’ arguments wrong… and then criticized them at precisely those points where he got them wrong….

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…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…

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

By Andrew Aghapour

…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…

Does Religion Still Matter?

By Haroon Moghul

…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…

Atheist Holiday Display: “A” Does Not Stand for “Art”

By Peter Manseau

News last week that holiday decorations in Chicago’s Daley Plaza will be joined this year by a light-up “A” for atheism served as a reminder that though the anti-religion camp may claim victory over believers on many fronts, iconography is not one of them. Sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and borrowed from the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s Out Campaign, the Daley Plaza “A” is the latest aesthetically challenged branding effort by…

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

By Matt Hamilton

…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…