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How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ocused on Japanese religion. In Tokugawa Religion, Bellah did for Japanese Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto what Max Weber did for Christianity in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He showed how the social values embedded in religious thinking can help to support certain kinds of social transformations. In the case of Tokugawa Religion these values helped to pave the way for Japanese industrialization and global economic success….

No Longer At Sea: Kate Bornstein Talks Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…ghten you for a month! And a harsh word from him could set you to thinking about suicide. I love the South Park episode about Scientology, “Trapped in the Closet.” Why does Tom Cruise lock himself in the closet? Because Hubbard doesn’t think he’s the world’s best actor. We all craved his approval that way, and now that he’s dead the only way you can get his it is by doing exactly what he wrote—or what Miscavige says. What made Hubbard so compellin…

Possible Heir to Dalai Lama Cleared of Corruption Charges

By Tsering Namgyal

…en though media failed to give much coverage. Western followers of Tibetan Buddhism, a significant source of tourist revenue to Himachal Pradesh and elsewhere, remain extremely disappointed, more at the media than the authorities. An initiation into politics The sheer preposterousness of the claims, about the Karmapa’s status as a “spy” in particular, did lead international Tibet specialists, such as Dibyesh Anand and Tsering Shakya, to weigh in….

Talking Salsa with Douglas Hofstadter, Enigmatic Author of Gödel, Escher, Bach

By Eliot Raynor

…ship between mathematics, patterns, language, and identity—in other words, about the science of the self. And Hofstadter himself has studied, and lived out, his own tangled “I”—as a thinker, an author, and someone with a modest measure of celebrity. Hofstadter turned 70 this past February. Curious about the “I” of Hofstadter at 70, and the relationship between the author and the halo of his public persona, I sat down with him in the Salsa Room to…

No More Pencils, No More Books: The Ultimate Goal of All Those Anti-Education Bills That Nobody’s Talking About

By Andrew L. Seidel

…he teaching of evolution in our public schools was to make it miserable on science teachers who dared educate children about this fact so that, whatever the Supreme Court might decide (and nowadays there’s little guarantee the court would do the right thing), teachers simply avoided the subject to make their lives easier. It worked. This is also one of the Republican goals for imposing burdensome new requirements on voters—think voter IDs and barr…

Who Benefits From Standardized Universal Time? And Other Questions to Ask As You Set Your Clocks Back This Weekend

By Michael Schulson

…nd, certificate in hand, set out for London to sell time.” Time reform was about efficiency and train schedules, and about the practical demands of a world in which it was suddenly possible for someone in Hong Kong to need to coordinate her schedule with someone in Lagos. But it was also about authority, and the terms of the change proceeded down some predictable lines of power. Colonial governments imposed standardized time systems in their colon…

QAnon Didn’t Just Spring Forth From the Void — It’s the Latest From a Familiar Movement

By Adam Willems

…t means. When we’re talking about contraceptive nationalism, we’re talking about a narrative strategy. It’s about stories that try to protect the American body politic, the “us” as a country, the idea of America as a cohesive unit that has specific relationships to things like bodies and sexuality. It’s a narrative framework that tries to protect the American people by discouraging invasion, impregnation, or insemination, by religious and sexual o…

Via Jokes, ChatGPT Chooses Which Religious Traditions and Figures Deserve Respect — And Therefore What Counts as ‘Religion’

By Robert M. Geraci

…) and a generic term for god (i.e., “god”). It would, I found, tell a joke about “god” but not about “Vivekananda” (although this wasn’t due to religious sensibilities, but rather to a generic resistance to the potential mockery of any individual.) I then tried again with Ramakrishna. ChatGPT did recognize Ramakrishna as a religious figure (as it apparently had not with Vivekananda) and refused to tell a joke about him for that reason. From these…

Devil’s Bookmark: How Not to Defend God

By Bernard Schweizer

…and miracles exist; in the other they don’t. So, if the two brothers talk about God, they talk about two fundamentally different things: Jimmy talks about God like he talks about his brother; his brother, on the other hand, talks about God like he talks about Dr. Jekyll or Hamlet or Emma Bovary. To pretend that the two brothers talk about the same thing would be a logical fallacy. And this is where Paul Copan stumbles. Surely, even a limited over…

The Islamophobia Election: How “Muslim” Became a Racial Identity

By Michael Schulson

…ng about religion. Right? His rhetoric seem to be less about matters of conscience, and more about bodies. Yeah. After the Orlando shooting, Clinton gave a speech. And there’s this whole rhetoric around, “Well there are good Muslims in America. They’re not all bad. We want them to help us, and feel included, and welcome them because we want them to sort of be on our side and help to reduce the problem of terrorism. We need to work with the Muslim…