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The Sacred and the Dead: ‘Friend of the Devil’ is a Love Song

By Pitman B. Potter

…e half-century they’ve been playing together can be seen to exemplify this spirit of love for one another in community. “Friend of the Devil,” co-written by Jerry Garcia and the band’s longtime lyricist (and official fifth member) Robert Hunter, is a good example. We are invited to empathize with the outlaw who is running from the sheriff and established society: “Got two reasons why I cry away this lonely night. The first one’s named sweet Anne M…

Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…f American spiritualists-in-letters—was ultimately a psalmist of the human spirit. He was, as we would now say, “spiritual (or sacred), not religious.” But then, in his judgment, that’s what democracy is all about. The very coin of the democratic realm is “sacred.” Whitman saw the work of fostering such a “religious democracy” as the work of the 20th century, and that task continues unabated today. He warned that there was only one thing that rea…

Omar Ahmad: Muslim, American, Cowboy Boot Aficionado (1965–2011)

By Wajahat Ali

…dialog that we will get to know each other!” He leveraged his good-natured spirit in politics, and was elected to the city council of San Carlos, and from there, to the mayor’s office. In that position, he did what every American mayor does, he fought with the Firemen’s Union. In all his activities, he remained committed to his faith. He helped nurture and train Muslim-American leadership. He was a behind-the-scenes mover, who used his vast entrep…

Tokyo Governor Says Tsunami is Divine Punishment—Religious Groups Ignore Him

By Levi McLaughlin

…began soliciting relief funds; as an organization that survived the January 17, 1995 earthquake in western Japan and provided relief to residents in Kobe, they are eager to help victims of this latest natural disaster. World Vision Japan is gathering relief funds and is working to aid victims; Caritas Japan, the Catholic charity, is gathering donations and working with dioceses to provide support in the afflicted region; the United Church of Chris…

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…

Is the Satanist Behind 10 Commandments Challenge Sincere?

By Joseph Laycock

…hosts, dubious psychotherapists, “cult cops,” and Christians interested in spiritual warfare sent America into hysteria over Satanic conspiracies that resulted in innocent people being prosecuted and imprisoned. Greaves initially assumed stories of criminal Satanists must have some basis in fact. He sought out self-identified Satanists, meeting a priest of the Church of Satan and even former members of The Process Church of the Final Judgment. Whi…

Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

By Diana Butler Bass

…re drawn from even older streams of evangelical politics, especially in the 1920s and 1950s). The specific sort of evangelical politics reported upon is now three generations deep—it is a maturing political-religious movement. To depict it otherwise is to miss the point. Why do conservative evangelicals love Trump, live in an alternate information universe, and believe that a great revival is at hand? They believe it because it is the world they w…

The SBC Sexual Abuse Scandal is a ‘Success’ Story of the Theological Vision and Social Structure of the ‘Conservative Resurgence’

By Diana Butler Bass

…h and Message, a kind of “non-creed” creed. The first version was issued in 1925 during the heyday of the Fundamentalist-Modernist crisis. A 1963 revision toned down the fundamentalism of the older statement, articulating more strongly Baptist latitude in doctrine that favored the liberty of conscience. Eventually, Southern Baptist hardliners—like Patterson and Pressler of Russell Moore’s mythology narrative—would define latitude as liberalism. Th…

This Halloween, Think of Islam as a Religion of Pieces. Reese’s Pieces.

By Haroon Moghul

…raven images. We’re not going to let that stop us. In true rugged American spirit, we must do the hard work and pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, which, if you’ll watch the safety demonstration video on the small screen in front of you, you’ll see can be found under your thobes. (No, not the wires—don’t pull on those just yet.) Here’s how American Muslims can make Halloween a little bit more frightful. For the trick-or-treater The best part o…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity. Masonic lodges proliferated in America from the 1720s onward. They were a religious movement as well as a social networking sensation, a pre-electronic Facebook. At first they recruited only affluent gentlemen and professionals, then later a broader…