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Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…

Oscar Watch: Why Spike Jonze’s Her Is Not About Technology

By Daniel Pecchenino

…ous lack of cars, one of the most striking things about Theodore Twombly’s Los Angeles of the near future is its absence of sacred space. Anyone who has spent much time in Los Angeles knows that it’s hard to go a block without seeing a Catholic church, synagogue, Protestant chapel (be it Korean, African-American, or conservative Iowan), storefront iglesia, Mormon ward, ashram, or some building owned by the Scientologists. The City of Angels was al…

The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

By Saba Soomekh

…n our suitcases and memories. Like most Iranian Jews, my family settled in Los Angeles. My sister and I immediately were placed in a Jewish day school, and it was in this little family-oriented cocoon of a school that I prospered and lived my everyday life until high school. It was high school that really changed my world. Here I was, attending a tiny Jewish day school from pre-school until 8th grade, with the same 10 kids every year, and now it i…

From Christian Temperance to D.A.R.E. — The War on Drugs Has its Roots in White Christian Nationalism

By Andrew Monteith

…school and high school in Whittier and Fullerton, both of which are in the Los Angeles metro area. He graduated high school in spring of 1930. Los Angeles was the heart of Narcotic Education Week and home to its earliest iteration; it would be shocking if Nixon never encountered it as a child. As president, Nixon amplified existing antidrug structures and reshaped national narratives, therefore it seems highly likely that he himself was influenced…

How Muslim Civic Activism Helped Pass California’s Prop 47

By Nick Street

…waid, an LA Voice organizer working with African-American Muslims in South Los Angeles, said that she is encouraged by the linkages across differences of race, generation and religion that activism around Prop 47 has forged. “It’s relatively new for immigrant Muslims to work on issues that aren’t exclusive to their communities,” she said. “This has been a huge multi-faith effort. It’s pretty exciting for me personally to see my community step into…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…tion studio. Nor is it the first. A studio called Unplug opened in 2014 in Los Angeles. Deepak Chopra has taught a class there. Good Morning America recently included Unplug in a segment on mindfulness. The studio was opened by a longtime editor at Glamour, Suze Yalof Schwartz. In a phone interview, Yalof Schwartz said that she decided to open the studio when she couldn’t easily find a place to learn meditation. I asked Yalof Schwartz how Unplug d…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…black theologians, including Cone, actually tend to reject Marxism as a philosophical source. It is too white, too Western and, tends to include only economic class, not race, in its power analysis. Cone’s theological sources are the bible and black experience. If one is going to argue against his theology, one must argue against these sources not Marx. So far, Beck has said nothing about black experience and nearly everything he has claimed about…

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

By Matt Hamilton

…ok pictures with her phone as we attempted the warrior pose. Was I back in Los Angeles? Why wasn’t this different? The staff—all devotees of the Ananda movement, a Hindu spiritual fellowship founded in northern California during the late 60s—only reinforced feelings of familiarity. There was Jemal, the dreadlocked, Yale-educated monk who waxed philosophic about the “sublime” benefits of a celibate lifestyle. There was Shivani, a Jewish girl from O…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…ork of its titular character, a metaphysical noir detective who lives in a Los Angeles that exists in a space equally with the dimensions of Heaven and Hell. As with Dogma and Good Omens, Constantine engages a certain “bureaucratizing of the sacred,” an understanding of the transcendent realm as reminiscent of the political, social, legal, and economic structures which define our lives. This is, of course, not substantially different from how, dur…