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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…

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…

I Want a Perfect Body

By Jeremy Biles

…nto the world at large, where it has merged with and inflected traditional Western ideals of beauty. Nelson writes, “The promise of bodily improvement is fueled by advertising campaigns and commercially-driven Western media, reflecting an increasingly narrow palette of beauty.” Holy Anorexia Anxiety and devotional attention to the body are, of course, nothing new in religious life. Scholars of medieval religion know that control over eating was, a…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…teful product of cultural progressivism. As a brown kid who grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago wanting to be white, the cultural progressivism I encountered in college helped me take pride in my color and ethnicity. I believe identities matter a great deal, and that expressing those identities in public is necessary and natural. But I think there are challenges, contradictions and blind spots in the broader movement of cultural progressivis…

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…

LGBT in Africa: Persecution and Persistence

By Peter Montgomery

…iour is largely blamed on the West. Meanwhile, the loudest and most public Western influence on this issue arguably comes from Western preachers, like Pastors Rick Warren and Scott Lively, who actively fund and promote homophobia in Africa In neighboring Nigeria, a draconian anti-gay law passed the House at the end of May. While international human rights advocates have mounted a campaign this month calling on the country’s president not to sign t…

Pope Decries ‘Ideological Colonization’ of Family; Islamic State Executes Gays and Others; Gay Couple Gets Long-Delayed Wedding in Mexico; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ophobia. In 2012, a few members of parliament proposed a bill to “prohibit promotion of homosexuality,” fashioned after the notorious Russian laws against “gay propaganda,” but under pressure from human rights organizations and foreign diplomats, the bill never made it past the first reading and has now been permanently shelved. Ukrainian laws also make no explicit provision for protecting from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. In f…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Iranian clerics’ proximity to, and collusion with, the secular reforms of Western-leaning and Western-style political leaders like the Shah. We live in that world still today, and it is in this sense that we did not need the September 11 attacks to learn that a certain form of neotraditional religiosity was alive and well around the world. What happened in the new century, and what has taken up a great deal of our cultural attention in the past…