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Is Sam Harris Really a White Supremacist?

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…rather his fundamental understanding of social groups. From his privileged Western viewpoint, Harris reduces social collectives to essential types. Where white supremacists subscribe to a typology of race, however, Harris assigns people to groups based on their creeds. It is telling that Harris is such a strong proponent of Samuel Huntington’s widely discredited “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, which posits a civilizational war between Islam and t…

How America Really Lost Its Mind: Hint, It Wasn’t Entirely the Fault of Hippie New Agers and Postmodern Academics

By Christopher Douglas

…ing? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false. Foucault, Feyerabend, Baudrillard—these postmodernists infected the academy with traditions of irrationalism that spread to the culture at large. Science, reason, and knowledge were social constructs. Though conservatives decried this academic relat…

Dalai Lama’s ‘Suck My Tongue’ Controversy Reveals Centuries-Old Christian Distortion of Tibetan Buddhism

By Geoffrey Goble

…a and awareness of the so-called “Tibet question” exploded into mainstream Western awareness. In 1989, the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize “for advocating peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people.” Seemingly overnight, this religious figure exiled from a remote Central Asian territory was mixing with the Western glitterati. He was the subject of two…

The Princess Bride: Royal Weddings for Everyone

By Katy E. Shrout

…the life course. But it is also simply an exaggerated, iconic version of a Western wedding. Kate Middleton might literally become a royal on her wedding day, but the contemporary wedding promises that any bride in white can be a symbolic princess. In the past two centuries, the Western bride has been visually associated with all sorts of images of ideal femininity: the Virgin Mary, saints, angels, movie stars. The most consistent icon, though, has…

Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth its Salt to the Zimmerman Verdict

By J. Kameron Carter

…es the point inasmuch as whiteness (and therefore the notion of the white, western god-man at its heart) is not a biological notion; it is narrative or a story, which is what Professor Brian Bantum was getting at in his commentary on the Zimmerman verdict. Whiteness is that story that one must aspire toward if one is to be deemed a proper citizen, a proper American. Rather than being biological, then, whiteness is better understood as a kind of di…

Still from the set of “The Exorcist: Believer" shows six people surrounding a bound, possessed girl all attempting to exorcise the demon.

Ecumenical ‘Exorcist’ Sequel Reflects Profound Cultural Changes Since the Catholic Original

By Joseph Laycock

…ar of demons as a Freudian “return of the repressed.” But many others felt Western civilization had lost something precious by turning the supernatural into an embarrassment and wanted to find it again. This may be why it’s virtually a requirement that exorcism movies open with a scene in Iraq, Africa, or some place where Westerners imagine there’s a more direct connection to the spirit world. This idea can be found in theologian Rudolf Otto’s The…

Is Karen Armstrong Right? Was Religion Always About Belief or Not?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…really about belief, or that the idea that it is is [sic] some newfangled Western notion. That is just plain false. Let me tackle the essential problems of assertion in the first and third paragraphs (I simply do not know how to respond to an ungrounded assertion about Armstrong’s “atheism,” when her public discussion of her own spiritual journey seems to contradict this description pretty clearly). The main problem here is the disavowal of histo…

The Most Religious Race: Islam in Europe

By Haroon Moghul

…still at least a dignity and a courageous unreasoning certitude, which in Western Christianity have been perceptibly melted down.” Caldwell’s hatred for Islam masks his hatred of the European and Western social trends that, in his view, enshrined an amoral hedonism as the ultimate cultural value and so deprived Europe of any larger meanings. Europe has no cause to fight for, and Islam, the “courageous” and “unreasoning” force (indeed, it is coura…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…nd that is how Brooks sells himself and his politics—he is a choice engine—promoting choice, heralding the individual, and spreading the gospel far and wide, enabling more decisions to be executed by you by making your life easier—you do not have to read Taylor after all! And here I must offer a requisite disclosure: I have read A Secular Age and I am on record as a critic of Taylor’s framing of modernity. Although I am fearless when I talk trash…

Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews

By Shalom Goldman

…that final clincher—that “Israel and the Jews are the biggest players” in today’s culture of violence. Critics of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish, might have misgivings about Israeli policies, but singling out “Israel and the Jews” as the world’s worst offenders sounds to anyone’s ears like anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. On the surface this episode seems like yet another in a series of recent controversies in which public figures run afoul of…