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“Those Federer Moments”: Sports, Sex, and the Gender of Grace

By Franklin Strong

…aking free from a defender near midfield, she looked up and, noticing that Japan’s goalkeeper was stationed too far forward, sent a shot over that goalkeeper’s hands and right into the goal. You never see a play like that; it indicated that, in that moment, Lloyd was so dialed-in, so far above her peers, that she could do anything. It was like when, after an easy semifinal win, Federer joked that the tennis ball looked “like a bowling ball or a ba…

What Happens When We Use Horror Movies to Interpret the Real World? 10 Questions for the Authors of ‘The Exorcist Effect’

By Eric Harrelson and Joseph P. Laycock

…one to analyze the relationship between religion and horror in places like Japan, Korea, Turkey, and Iran. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? We really hope no one thinks we are advocating censorship. We view censoring movies or books or music as a reactionary move that doesn’t address the core issues of the problems it purports to solve. Furthermore, stigmatizing film, music, and other art can actually lead to more harm…

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

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…his one focused 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…

Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence

By Michael Jerryson

…ys that illustrate the violent history of Buddhism across Mongolia, Tibet, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India. Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence. Although the book only arrived at bookstores last month, it apparently touched some nerves in the academic community bef…

The ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Worldview of Trump’s Conspiracy Doctor is Part of a Transnational Movement

By André Gagné

…ssions and founder of the New Apostolic Reformation in 2001, said that the Japanese economy suffered a severe blow because the emperor of Japan had sex with the sun goddess, the chief “spiritual ruler” or principality over the nation. As a professor of missions studying the growth of Pentecostal churches in the Majority World, Wagner eventually adopted Hiebert’s “excluded-middle” worldview which led him to write numerous books on “spiritual warfar…

The Double Life of the War Criminal

By Laurie Patton

…try degree at Moscow State University, and then travelled around India and Japan, ultimately settling in China to study Chinese herbs. “In the mid-1990s,” reports the site, “Dr. Dabic” returned to mother Serbia for good.” The website concludes by asserting that he has since “emerged as one of the prominent experts in the field of alternative medicine, bioenergy and macrobiotic diet in the whole of the Balkans.” And, to top it all off, Dr. Dabic ca…

American Virgin Doesn’t Quite Get It

By Gabriel Mckee

…put the youth minister in an Australian gay club? In Rio for Carnival? In Japan for Kanamara Matsuri, the Festival of the Steel Phallus? But doing so means taking the character out of the milieu in which he works best—and, worse, presenting whitewashed portraits of cultures whose sexuality isn’t necessarily as healthy as Seagle would have us believe. American Virgin tries to give Adam a complex odyssey, a sort of sexual hero’s journey. But the wo…

Why I’m Grateful for 2012, The Rapture, and other Millennial Delusions

By Jay Michaelson

…lennialists are quietists; on the contrary, like the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which unleashed Sarin gas in the Tokyo subways, many take matters into their own hands, often with tragic results. One of the most important, if subtle, transformations in American public life, for example, was the shift in evangelical thinking from pre-millennialism to post-millennialism, which took place gradually from the end of the 19th century to the end of the…

Yes, the Navy Yard Shooter Was a Buddhist

By Joshua Eaton

…h an atrocity—despite Buddhism’s history of violence in places like Burma, Japan, Tibet and Sri Lanka [see: Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence, by Michael Jerryson in RD]. However, when the perpetrator is a Muslim we assume, as a matter of course, that religion was their primary motivation—despite the verses in the Qur’an that say murdering a single innocent person is the same as murdering all of humanity. Of course, there is nothing t…

RDBook: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World: An Interview with Michelle Goldberg

By Mandy Van Deven

…mpromising the integrity of an indigenous organization’s work? There are a number of organizations that are really good at channeling aid to women working at the grassroots. The Global Fund for Women, for example, does amazing work. On a more macro scale, people in developed countries often have access to levers of power that people on the ground don’t. Agnes Pareyio’s story is instructive. She’s an amazing Masai woman in Kenya who runs a shelter…