Search for "More About Buddhism & Science"

Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…es with families, and particularly father-son relations. What is wonderful about this film is that it is about people who happen to be “Muslims,” and not about “Islam” per se. Part of their lives are oriented around prayers and the Hajj, but they have many other aspects of their lives. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Films and religions are analogous, and we can learn a lot about one through the other. They are like each o…

Sometimes Dialogue is Not the Answer and Neutrality is a Trap: An Interview with the Authors of ‘The Neutrality Trap’

By Chrissy Stroop

…edibility as interveners by asserting their neutrality. We’d been thinking about these issues for a long time, but what finally pushed us to undertake this project was the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. A movement was building to do something about the way communities of color are disproportionately targeted by the police. As with many movements for change, one motivation for action was anger. Sometimes this led to minor acts of vio…

‘Pure White’ Examines the White Supremacist Origins of Evangelical Purity Culture

By Emma Cieslik

…ally, really large. Why is this a national issue? Because this wasn’t just about getting more attention, this was about making a political statement. True Love Waits placed more than 200,000 purity pledges signed by teenagers on the National Mall in 1994. Image: LifeWay Christian Resources At the time, President Clinton was in office. In fact, during the event, some SBC [Southern Baptist Convention] youth and Richard Ross, who started True Love Wa…

Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…s, the rabbis basically riffing, or jamming. You know, “What if we thought about it this way? Hey, what would happen if we thought about it this way?” That’s really the spirit of The Passionate Torah—a playground of sorts, a way of experimenting with the questions and issues at hand in the hopes that something new and exciting will result. The academic tone of this book is a pretty big departure from your two previous books, a personal narrative a…

Peter Beinart’s Controversial The Crisis of Zionism: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Treatment

By Shaul Magid

…ween the United States and Israel.” The critics, it appears, care far less about Israel than they do about what American Jews think about Israel. If Beinart’s book were an indictment at all it was not of Israel, but of American Jewry. And the anger it evoked tells us more about what the fervent American Jewish pro-Israel critics really care about. Some years ago I presented an academic paper at an American Academy of Religion conference comparing…

Peru’s Civil Unions Bill Killed as Bishop Calls Sponsor ‘Faggot’; Germany Fines Men For Trying To Force Gay Muslim Teen Into Hetero Marriage; LGBT Global Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…hing that will benefit all of society in the long run. “This is not a Bill about ‘gay marriage’, it is about ‘equal marriage’. It is not about weakening one of the strongest institutions in society, it is about strengthening it by making it inclusive and for everyone. “It is about removing the sense of shame, isolation and humiliation from many who feel excluded. It lets them know that Ireland is a country which believes in equality before the law…

Pro-LGBT Evangelical David Gushee: “I’m With You and the Church Needs to Change.”

By Sarah Posner

…istory. About social change, about civil rights movements, about religion, about power, about the Bible, about oppression, and about love. He has been thinking a lot about when the pro-LGBT movement within evangelicalism, one in which he has become a leading figure, will sweep across the church, transforming pulpits once known as bastions of anti-gay diatribe into bastions of Christ-like embrace of LGBT believers. He is certain change is coming—he…

Are We Living in a Simulation? Bad Religion, Bad Media Combine in New Doc, ‘A Glitch in the Matrix’

By Shannon Trosper Schorey

…these bad religion/bad media discourses and spins them out into a dialogue about embodied empathy. It’s nice to think about, but ultimately feels like coming up short. If the topic is abuse, let’s ask better questions. We owe it to the 10 million underserved and understudied women and men who are abused each year. If the topic is simulation theory, what if, instead, we asked about the kinds of work this theory is doing, for whom, and how? What kin…

Another “Hot Text” For the War on Women: Rosemary’s Baby

By Mary Valle

…). These are not just personal anxieties. The sexual revolution was really about thinking about personal choices in a political context rather than “a change in moral standards” as conservatives believed. That is both liberating and terrifying. Explain the difference. I think that horror films like It Lives Again and The Brood and all the other fetal horror classics are [typically] interpreted as being about women and men’s psychological angst abo…

The Theology of Westboro: The “World’s Meanest Church” Is More Than Picket Signs

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ces or change what happens next in their story. To that end, I was careful about how I wrote about children in the church since I don’t want to make it harder for them to leave in the future. I also wanted the people of Topeka and Kansas to read the book and see their own experiences treated with respect, even when I sometimes was critical of their response to WBC. I wanted to be sure that the dead I wrote about—people like fallen Marine Matthew S…