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Pagan Martyrs, Murderous Monks: Agora Hits US Shores

By Nathan Schneider

…t religious passions pose to all that is wise and tolerant about the human spirit. Just in time for my own childhood indoctrination (one which I am loathe to disavow), Carl Sagan repeated this telling in his Cosmos TV series. Sagan followed Gibbon in associating Hypatia’s murder with the destruction of Alexandria’s famous library; with her body, away went the literature of the ancient world, lost forever. To remember Hypatia is now to take a stand…

Layoffs on the Religious Right

By Bill Berkowitz

…ction, invoked the memory of Winston Churchill while trying to buoy up the spirit of the GOP faithful. “The spirit of Winston Churchill was alive and well on Tuesday night at Focus on the Family Action headquarters,” Minnery said. “You may recall that in the most desperate days of World War II when Great Britain was being pounded daily by Hitler’s Luftwaffe that Winston Churchill called on his countrymen not to despair from danger but to rise to t…

AR-15 Lapel Pins are More Than Political Provocation — They’re Symbols of the Violence at the Heart of White Christian Nationalism

By Annika Brockschmidt

…nity” originated as a youth movement. The core principle was that a strong spirit required a strong body as well—a principle that made its way to the US and was fused with the frontier spirit and Manifest Destiny, as historian Peter Manseau explains: “All of this might seem far removed from holiday cards, until one recalls that it is Jesus himself who has been proposed as the exemplar of the ‘manly and virile’ faith found at the root of Christmas…

What This All-Star Christian Movie Gets Wrong About Christianity

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…that he was so moved by it, so shaken, that it can only have been the Holy Spirit. I don’t think I overstate things when I suggest that the screenwriters mean for us to interpret their movie by the same rubric. The movie moves us… or, well, it moves the people it was intended for. Aha, that must be the Holy Spirit at work! Theologically, though, such a rubric is entirely wrongheaded. If my mind should generate some pious-sounding blurt, and if I s…

New Book by Olivier Roy Argues that Aggressive Attempts to Christianize the West Actually Hasten Secularism

By Ivan Strenski

…n Switzerland has further secularized Christianity in that country. In the spirit of religious tolerance, the Swiss don’t object to the building of mosques as such, but only to the foreign-ness of them; to the fact that they don’t fit into Switzerland’s Christian character. Thus, building ‘Swiss-looking’ mosques (cuckoo-clock tower minarets?) would be fine because they’d conform to Swiss aesthetics ―even though, ironically, promoting Islam in the…

Why Go to Church If You Don’t Believe Anymore?

By Angela Bonavoglia

…fe? Who would design this? In the end, Jesus resigns himself, commends his spirit to God in faith. Was his faith rewarded? Will ours be? I want to know: how did Jesus really feel when it was over? Was it all worth it? Did he come to life again, not in body (that belief is fast becoming myth even in Christian circles) but in spirit? Will we? The service finished, I head out of that beautiful garden at the back of the church toward the street, in th…

The Economy is Sacred, Stupid

By Gary Laderman

…treatment, save for classics like Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and more recent sociological studies like Robert Wuthnow’s God and Mammon in America. A few questions may help make the case about the intimate, if unexpressed, links between money and religion: Is the pursuit of wealth an ultimate value? Is self-worth tied to the accumulation of material goods? How do moral virtues connect to marketplace success? Is mo…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…ntial property, although it has been in use as a medical facility since the 1950s, collecting 14,000 petition signatures to push for a city planning commission hearing. Their argument, ironically, was that the disruption anti-abortion protesters would bring—coming to the neighborhood in groups as large as 500 for some regular events, with smaller protests around the clock—would constitute a nuisance and safety concern. “We told the city that if th…

Art(ful) History in Texas

By Lauri Lebo

…renia where teachers aren’t sure what they’re supposed to teach,” he said. Spirit of America One of the new amendments places slavery as the third cause of the Civil War, behind states’ rights and sectionalism. Additionally, students must study the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis alongside the writings of Abraham Lincoln. McLeroy says that he and other board members weren’t trying to ignore slavery as a cause of the Civi…

The Sacred and the Dead: I Love You More than Words Can Tell

By David Vanderveen

…aid his bones by the waterside. My favorite verse from the Bible is Genesis 1:2, “…and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” In the water is where I wrestle with God and where the truth of the universe tends to reveal itself to me. It’s home and it’s always humbling. Every July 4 since Mark left us, his friends, family, and neighbors have hosted a community paddle-out where kids, parents, and grandparents paddle to the outer reef at Bro…