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In Praise of Failure: Is Defining Religion Such a Good Idea?

By Ivan Strenski

…seemingly irresolvable confrontation, we need to step back a bit and think about language, since we are at least talking about how we use, or should use, words. Fully to appreciate what I am saying, know that here in Riverside County, California, I am writing close in time and space to the shootings in San Bernardino. I have been driven to distraction and anger by the way the word “terrorism” is kicked about. For example: mass shootings by a white…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…llins told the New York Times Magazine in a rare interview, “I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.” The idea for the series came to Collins while she was watching TV. On one channel, there was a reality TV show. On the other, there was footage from the Iraq War. Ergo, the basic premise, which is a kind of Theseus-and-the-Minotaur/“Survivor”/Gladiator mashup: a reality TV show, in a dystopian future, where children ki…

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

By Chris Stedman

…poisons everything.” The next day, I was called “a traitor” when I tweeted about efforts to raise funds to rebuild a mosque in Joplin, Missouri that was burned to the ground. When I tweeted about reaching out to the Sikh community and expressing solidarity, I was accused of trying to make atheism a religion. And I wasn’t alone in facing such criticism. When skeptic blogger Kylie Sturgess wrote a post about the Joplin mosque she was called “a terr…

Jesus, Gentrification, and the Hypocrisy of “Diversity”: An Interview with D.L. Mayfield

By Kaya Oakes

…n’t really about this kind of magical lip-service to God—they were usually about women who went and were very involved in trying to bring about a more equitable kingdom, seeing liberation come both spiritually and socially (obviously, lots of colonialism and imperialism in that story). As with most young people, my idea that I wanted to be a missionary was really just a vague sense of wanting to do good. Nowadays, I think a lot of that came from a…

I’m Not Here to Fix Evangelicals, But to Show Them Who They Are: An Interview With the Author of ‘White Evangelical Racism’

By Chrissy Stroop

…tter that the news media and voters keep believing that they actually care about moral issues. They care about power. And many of them are in power, so that is a concern for all sorts of policy issues, especially for reproductive and sexual rights. It matters that the media and voters understand that moral issues are a tool for wielding power, and for obfuscating evangelicals’ need for access to it. It may be that they have power because of patria…

Alabama’s IVF Ruling Reveals Deep Ties to This Increasingly Influential Christian Right Movement

By Annika Brockschmidt

…rrence expose the movement’s loftier theocratic aspirations: It’s not just about IVF or even about contraception (though it is about both). Parker’s opinion completely disregards the current legal status of First Amendment Law. He writes as though Alabama is a theocracy, and I suspect that is intentional. The religion clauses are addressed to Congress. ‘Congress shall make no law…’ Initially, they applied only at the federal level and we had estab…

New World A-Coming: How Black Religion Helped Shape Racial Identity

By Judith Weisenfeld

…in transnational perspective. I came to think of the people I was writing about as “apostles of race” in offering new ways of thinking about the relationship between religio-racial identity. When I submitted the manuscript, my editor, Jennifer Hammer, and her colleagues at New York University Press, encouraged me to go with a title that emphasized the dynamic change the leaders and members wanted to effect, so we settled on New World A-Coming. Ho…

White Supremacy, Mental Illness, or Society: What’s to Blame for Religious Violence?

By Michael Schulson

…at all? As is so often the case, the act of assigning blame tells us more about the blamer than it does about society. Where evidence is absent, preconceptions—or, to use a less euphemistic term, prejudices—have room to roam. As a small library of commentary has documented, Western observers are often quicker to blame Islam for an attack by a self-professed Muslim than they are to blame Christianity for a similar attack by a self-professed Christ…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…es” has committed an “Expression of Regret” offense. Some are less worried about the corrupting influence of new media at large than they are about the unsavory mixing of sacred digitized files with more plebian or even offensive digital files. For example, how should a Muslim treat an iPod once he or she has downloaded the entire Qur’an onto it? Is there a difference between downloading the Qur’an onto an iPod intended solely for worship purposes…

“Taking a Stand for Jesus” in the Public Schools

By Lauri Lebo

…nism in science class for the upcoming school year. A discussion last week about the possibility was in response to Lousiana’s Science Education Act, which opens the door to teaching creationism under the guise of “academic freedom.” At a meeting last month, district officials said they wanted to explore the possibility. But according to an article Sunday in Baton Rouge’s The Advocate, board members shied away amid fears of a costly lawsuit which…