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Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided Explores the Dark Side of Positive Thinking

…has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a ‘victim’ and a ‘whiner.’” It’s satisfying, in a cranky contrarian way, to watch a writer as smart as Ehrenreich take aim at something as universally revered as dogged optimism. Yet while America’s obsessive positivity might be risible, it…

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Billy Graham Is Probably Not the Author of His Own “Final Chapter”

…Perhaps there would be fire, smoke, and stench. Graham observed that Gary, Indiana, looked a bit like hell if you peered down from an airplane. But perhaps hellfire was metaphorical. Graham mused, “[Jesus] uses the word fire, and I have often wondered if that is a terrible fire within our hearts for God, for fellowship with God, that can never be quenched. We’ve rejected God. We’ve turned our back on God. We can never know God. … [Hell is] the ban…

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Rope of God: The Aceh Tsunami—Four Years On

…7th-century treaty between one of the Sultans of Aceh and the British East India Company that guaranteed their independence as “proof” they were not part of the former Netherlands Indies or modern Indonesia. For more than a century, Dutch Christian colonials and Indonesian secular nationalists found it convenient to label the Acehenese as Islamic fanatics, extremists, terrorists—or by whatever term currently in vogue for demonizing Muslim resistan…

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Religion in Real Time on CNN’s “Believer”: A Conversation with Reza Aslan

…and practice of widely misunderstood religions. From the ascetic Aghori in India to Vodou in Haiti, from the doomsday cult of “JeZus with a Z” in Hawaii to Scientology in America and Santa Muerte in Mexico, the series takes viewers on an intriguing, and sometimes harrowing, tour of religion in real time—as far from orthodoxy as you can get. A couple of weeks ahead of the show’s March 5th premiere, Reza and I talked about the decline of religious l…

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The Landmark 85-Year-Old Report Absent From Debates Over Missionary’s Death

…s death, Chau highlighted the motivating force behind his journey into the Indian Ocean: “You guys might think I’m crazy in all this …. But I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people.” There is no end to the commentary on the meaning of Chau’s death. To some, he’s a martyr invoked in the same breath as Jim Elliot and his fellow missionaries who lost their lives in efforts to reach the most remote populations for Christ in Ecuador in 19…

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You Are Not Your Star Sign

…his arms. Ophiuchus has long been part of sidereal astrology (dominant in India, among other places), but absent from the traditionally twelve-signed tropical system most popular with American newspapers until now, with the revised map of the night sky and its influence on human destiny. Just as the revision of the Zodiac had induced popular outcry—people who had long self-identified as melodramatically emotional Pisces were suddenly told, for in…

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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…drives the money changers from the Temple. For centuries, many temples in India functioned like banks, making interest-bearing loans. Commercialized forms of penance helped inspire the Reformation in Europe. The landscape of American religion is often conceived of as a market in which churches and denominations compete for worshippers. Sales tactics influence evangelists, and companies use religion to push political agendas. Nevertheless, there’s…

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Mini-Review of A Jihad for Love

…umerous awards including Best Film at the Tri-Continental Film Festival in India and Best Documentary at Turin LGBT Film Festival. The film explores the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in several different countries, portraying jihad not as a holy war but as a struggle to reconcile one’s faith with one’s sexuality. The film doesn’t feature experts or religious scholars, but rather individual women and men who are trying to find their place in a f…

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10 Years Later: An American Muslim Looks Back at Iraq

…the war. My mother’s family (which is, immediately speaking, from northern India) is supposedly descended from an Iraqi who left Mesopotamia around 1250. In Indo-Islamic culture, among others, we have shajaras, literally (family) trees. That’s how we know. This fortunate ancestor (being Arab) spoke Arabic, so he found employment in the service of the Delhi Sultans, and the family line was from then on inseparable from Islamic law, arts and letters…

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Is Monsanto Satan? The Pleasure and Problem of Conspiracy Theory

…ferring instead to identify the great deceiver as a symbol of evil. People today would likely blame the inkwell incident on madness. And we now see madness itself, once blamed on the Evil One and his servants, as emerging from the chaotic causal nexus of biology and circumstance. But Satan has not disappeared. We need him too much. In the ongoing struggle with inexplicable suffering, there is no greater comfort than finding a target for simple, ri…

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