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Sing the Glory of the Smoke: The Spiritual History of Jazz

By Andrew Aghapour

…ad to make stuff up. I had to say, what if we thought about ritual in this way, in the way of jazz? What if we thought about community in the way of jazz? I also wanted to propose, in writing, the kinds of things the sound proposes in our hearing. And the way I did this was to inundate myself in the music I was writing about at any particular moment. And when I wrote about Cecil Taylor, I listened to Cecil Taylor. When I was thinking about writing…

Way Beyond Atheism: God Does Not (Not) Exist

By Paul Wallace

…views.” This would be quite a good argument, if it were true. The Negative Way There is within Christian theology a great tradition of negating “God.” By this I mean the negation of everything we think we know about God, every concept we carry about God, every image we imagine of God, everything that God “is” to us. In order to demonstrate how this works, we will consider three levels of statements about God. In addition, four different images of…

Hell, in Rob Bell’s Own Words: State of Belief Radio

By The Editors

…who say: “I always had these questions, I always wondered about this, I always knew there was another way to understanding this…” It’s really… It blows me away. Every night, at one of these events, I just… Wow. What an amazing thing to be a part of. [WG]: Tell us, what has been your favorite comment from a reader, or, one or two of your favorite comments. [RB]: There’ve been a number who have said, “You know, I might actually believe in God now.”…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…early African-American print cultures, and especially those who paved the way for my own research. The study of early African-American print is having something of a renaissance right now, with a number of books, conferences, and journal special issues devoted to the topic emerging in the past few years. So it could seem (and some have claimed) that this is a newly invented field. But this is not at all the case. My book depends upon the work of…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…y writing the Christian Right’s obituary, the theocratic coalition and the way it carries out its politics has dynamically evolved. “A number of Christian right legal agencies have produced manuals for churches and related institutions, to rewrite such things as job descriptions to extend the legal definition of ‘ministry’ in order to seek exemption from labor standards and civil rights laws, and to inoculate themselves against discrimination laws…

Nadia Bolz-Weber on Becoming ‘God’s Bitch’

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gospels the more intrigued I was by Mary Magdalene and how she seemed to always be around. I called her “the patron saint of just showing up,” because she’s always there. I love that—this woman, who had been delivered from so much, is chosen by Jesus to be the first witness to the resurrection. It could have been somebody else, but Mary Magdalene was chosen to be the one to tell the men of the resurrection. I love that text in John 20 where she do…

Fight the Power: How to Read, and Re-Read, the Book of Revelation

By Wil Gafney

…estion is, who sets the bounds? For many groups, people will say, well the way we read it is the only right way. But I would start to look at the whole history of this book, and how it has lived beyond the context in which John wrote it (the Jewish war against Rome and the world that in which he and the Jewish people were suffering under Roman oppression). I found it most useful to look at as many interpretations as we find. I was also really inte…

Christians Should Give Up “Christianity”: An Interview with Peter Rollins

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…are told that we can have both, especially in church. If we pray the right way, believe the right way, we can have all these things. Are we not entitled to them? They’re addictions for me because of the way they operate for most of us. They give a fantasy of wholeness whenever we’re really fractured. What I argue is that religious, cultural, and political beliefs give us a sense that we on this side of the river are right and those people on that…

The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger’s Religious Fiction

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ublished collections of short stories already circulate). Perhaps the best way, the only way, to end this is the way Salinger ended his Seymour reflections… not with the gunshot in a short story, but with Buddy’s final words at novella’s end. One of the thousand reasons I quit going to the theater when I was about twenty was that I resented like hell filing out of the theater just because some playwright was forever slamming down his silly curtain…

Why Belief in the Primacy of Language Leads to a Misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins, Islamophobia, and Politics

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…to see as viscerally exciting for all of us, that’s something that we’re always susceptible to, always going to be tempted by. In the American context, especially, we very often reach for race as a way to exercise that. It’s a difficult thing to talk about because you can’t just make it into a moralistic question. We’re talking about affects that are working through us. But I do think that we can put those affects into conversation with other goal…