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Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…wrecked havoc on the tiny Himalayan nation of Nepal. Joining me aboard the flight from Singapore were a few other journalists from the United States and Europe, a team from the China Lingshan International Rescue in their distinctive fire engine red uniforms, and several dozen surgeons from South Africa who had come to Nepal with Gift of the Giver organization, an NGO founded in 1992 by a Sufi sheik from Istanbul. Among us were Christians, Hindus,…

Useless and Useful: A True Sage Reviews The Tao of Happiness

By Alan Levinovitz

…r, the Tao-Te-Ching, and other exotic classics are endlessly repurposed as business manuals, dating manuals, or quote-mines for calendars, served up by beaming gurus whose bios tend to emphasize spiritual intuition over formal education. The Tao of Happiness: Stories from Chuang Tzu for Your Spiritual Journey Derek Lin Tarcher November 17, 2015 In keeping with this formula, Lin opens the The Tao of Happiness by telling readers that “in Chinese cul…

As Long As There’s Fear, We Aren’t Ready for Atheism: A Conversation with Theologian and Ex-Priest Daniel Maguire

By Alana Massey

…in the morning and seeing the sun shine and the sky blue and the birds in flight and saying, ‘Thank you God,’ and you’re taking that away from me.” You write “theism promises simplicity and security and delivers neither,” but you do refer to a world that was “not yet ready for atheism.” Do you believe the world is now ready for atheism? As long as there is fear, it will never be fully ready. Fear makes you reach for a supernatural insurance polic…

Pope Benedict’s 2006 Islamophobia Controversy Wasn’t an Isolated Incident — Islamophobia is an Integral Part of His Theological Legacy

By Wendy Mallette

…ticulturalism” that’s led to a “pathological” form of “self-hatred” and “a flight from one’s own heritage.” Throughout Benedict’s narrative, from the Holy Roman Empire through the Crusades and contemporary Europe, Islam represents Europe’s threatening, external other. Benedict’s account of European history, as Columbia University’s Joseph A. Massad writes, “recode[s] European forms of despotism as democracy”—for example, portraying the Crusades as…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…nes, known to all Americans and read by many—especially in airports. On my flight to Istanbul, Time was available in the first airport lounge, Newsweek in the second. Against a backdrop of shouting mobs, smoke and fire, Time’s headline reads: THE AGENTS OF OUTRAGE An embassy attacked. Diplomats murdered. The new calculus of violence against America. Published on September 13, its author is Bobby Ghosh, senior editor for Time International. Then, f…

RDPulpit: Ahmadinejad Gives Another Victory to the Israeli Right

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

…ntury and sought to provide protection for Jews who were treated as second-class citizens in both Christian Europe and Muslim countries for many hundreds of years. The desire for a safe haven made perfect sense, though the antagonism that they encountered from many Palestinians made perfect sense as well given the previous history of Western colonialism and Christian crusades. Palestinians saw the Jews as an invading force that would uproot their…

Stem Cell Chronicles: Why Politics and Science Most Certainly Should Not Be Separated

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…rbing ways. And it carried a cost; the Bush administration created a great flight of scientists to the private sector, to foreign countries, and it decimated the morale at some of the premier scientific institutions funded by the US government, the Centers for Disease Control most notably. But the President is wrong to suggest that politics can simply be extracted from scientific enquiry. This simple statement is actually part of much larger misun…

Defying Gravity Defies Sci-Fi Conventions

By Gabriel Mckee

…nning to reach toward the stars, we were becoming emotional androids. “Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings,” Dick wrote. “Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make our pilgrimages there. Our natures will be going there, too. Ad astra— but per hominem.” That, in a sense, is the fundamental concern of ABC’s hard-SF soap opera Defying Gravity. The show…

Updated with Audio: Secular Good, Muslim Bad: Unveiling Tunisia’s Revolution

By Haroon Moghul

…ab countries. There is little Islamist fervor there, it has a large middle class, and under Mr. Ben Ali and his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, it has invested heavily in education. Not only are women not required to cover their heads, they enjoy a spectrum of civil rights, including free contraception, that are well beyond those in most countries in the region. To repeat, there’s little “Islamist fervor” in Tunisia because Islamist fervor—something…

“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

By Anita Little

…s hanging out on stoops and patios. As Tyler emphasized, this is a working-class black community. The one element that marked it as a place where something terrible had taken place was the significant police presence. As we visited Ferguson Market and Liquor, the corner store Michael Brown visited before heading to his encounter with Wilson on Canfield Drive, there were at least six Ferguson police officers with accompanying cruisers guarding the…