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

By Ivan Strenski

…Sunday services have tumbled into the single digits, and roughly the same number disavow belief in major Christian doctrines. Despite the political impact of white evangelicals, and the United States’ claim to being exceptional in escaping Western Europe’s radical de-Christianization, Gallup reports that fewer than 50% of Americans declare membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque. Yet, despite the decline of organized religion, the latest boo…

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

By Angela Bonavoglia

…e the hidden corners of the cathedral until we arrive at the last station, number 14, where Jesus is laid in the tomb. From there, we move outside to a garden, where we stand in a circle, the cross gone now, face to face with one another. I am both in the process and outside of it. I believe in something, but not most of this. I hold on because there is some deep comfort and some essential discomfort here. I can’t let go. Why? What draws me year a…

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…

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…

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…

Updated: A Response to President Obama’s Speech in Cairo

By Hussein Rashid

…uggests the opposite: We must face these tensions squarely. And so in that spirit, let me speak as clearly and as plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together. Compare this to verse 49:13 of the Qur’an which says God created nations and tribes so that we may know one another and the most noble is the one who is best in their conduct. The allusion is quite obvious, and is geared towards at Muslim audi…

Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” Depicts Death Struggle Between Hope and Despair

By Peter Laarman

…for destroying those who destroy the earth. It seems pretty clear that the spirit of radical mystic Thomas Merton hovers over this film. Merton’s name comes up twice in the screenplay, and both Schrader and his protagonist seem to resonate with the words that Merton wrote in 1962 to Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan theologian, poet, and revolutionary: The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with e…

Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

By Spencer Dew

…r state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this map’s data, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, runs a more comprehensive map on their own…

The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…The point is that the really seismic changes at the Vatican all came in the 15th and 16th centuries, the age that just so happened to encompass the Protestant rebellion and the emergence of modern science at once. But by the 17th century, mathematics—and specifically mathematical physics—achieved a dominance that overturned the main interpretive principles that had been widely accepted since the time of Aristotle’s Physics: namely, that the variou…

Life as a Game Show: Reading Slumdog Millionaire

By Paul Courtright

…ery Indian film faithful to the Bollywood aesthetic formula. It produces a number of rasa, “tastes,” in the viewer: heroism, humor, disgust, eros, fear, and tranquility. The final dance scene on the train platform pays homage to the familiar Bollywood genre. The musical score crackles with energy. There are any number of reasons why Slumdog has emerged as one of this year’s favorites among American audiences. Perhaps the Oscar nominations reflect…