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The Transfiguration of the Fanboy: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, The Conclusion

By Mark Dery

…n Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), passim. [8] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 151. [9] Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 10. [10] Quoted in “Jazzin’ For Blue Jean” entry, Wikipedia…

Does Evolution Favor Religion?

By Mark Vernon

…t a tribe including many members who, from possession in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. To put it another way, Darwin questions the exclusively selfish foundations of morality. As he also wrote, “the moral sense is fundamentally i…

The Abandoned Orphanage: Hillary Clinton’s Mother Teresa Moment

By Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce

…Clinton’s religious history, we studied her relationships with a number of spiritual mentors, including Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, who was soon replaced by “sacred psychologist” Jean Houston, who famously helped the First Lady get in touch with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, after Mother Teresa died, Clinton invoked the spirit of the nun as her guiding light so religiously that one might be excused for wondering whether she meant it more tha…

Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

By Wendy Norris

…the Earth.” The cracker barrel-styled reading of Acts—and of I Corinthians 13 at the prayer meeting the week before where 150 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a c…

Capricology: Television, Tech, and the Sacred

By Diane Winston

…ers no manicure could ever soften. Yeah. Sounds like Dr. Spock childrearing 101 to me. Nothing like a sick helicopter parent. The real genius of Caprica will be the weekly mind game Ron Moore and his crew are going to play with us about when life begins, and ends. Does life continue after physical “death,” and if life is not in a human body, is it really “human” after all? How does a new religious movement gain followers? What are the moral and et…

The Myth of ‘Voodoo’: A Caribbean American Response to Representations of Haiti

By Dianne M. Stewart

…term with endless contemplative meanings and inferences, including “god,” “spirit,” and “deep mystery” is one such religious culture that should not be misconstrued as any devil-dealing clan. Today, libraries of reliable scholarship confirm Vodou’s credibility as a viable historic and contemporary tradition most prominent in West Africa and Haiti. This religious heritage links Haiti, Benin, Togo, and Ghana through a civilizing legacy where cognate…

How Not To Respond to Haiti

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…d, but illness decimated the troops and they finally surrendered on January 1, 1804. Since then, the small island nation’s fortunes have waxed and waned, often in tandem with American military occupation. In this, her story is like many others, deeply saddening, and offering a glimpse into the “dark side” of the European Renaissance (this is the marvelous title of Walter Mignolo’s important book on the ambivalence of European Modernity in the Amer…

Yearning For A God We Can Live With

By Benjamin Weiner

…nister. Michaelson, in his late thirties, is a freelance teacher of Jewish spirituality, known particularly as the leader of Nehirim, an organization fostering spiritual consciousness among GLBT Jews. A poet and prolific essayist, he is also co-founder of the literary journal Zeek, and a regular voice in the Jewish press (and lately the Huffington Post), whose writing challenges the ethnic and mythological components of Jewish identity for the sak…

Hipsters v. Hasidim Over Brooklyn Bike Lane

By Nathan Schneider

…t bikes,” says Theo Angell, a 41-year-old artist who joined in the December 19 ride. “Bikes pose no threat to anyone.” He concluded that the lanes were removed “for basically religious reasons.” Scratch an apparently religious reason, however, and there is often something more than sheer dogma beneath the surface. The “plague of the artists” prayer, for instance, is as much a reaction to Williamsburg’s skyrocketing rents as to invading interlopers…

All the Lonely People: Holiday Blues and the Epidemic of Isolation

By Peter Laarman

…lot of it will be empty blather, but we can hope that at least some of America’s pastors will help us think about what showing good will toward all of God’s children actually requires—and (speaking of angels) about how the better angels of our nature can actually be awakened. In that spirit, we and those preachers might well consider the import of this passage from a lovely prayer by Howard Thurman: “Give me the listening ear. I seek this day the…