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Is it Kosher Now? The Evolution of Kashrut in the Wake of the Agriprocessor Fiasco

By Benjamin Weiner

…gated in the past tense, if it isn’t already. When the Feds raided last May 12th, they arrested close to four hundred illegal immigrants. More upsetting were the subsequent revelations that these workers had been laboring in illegally dangerous conditions, that some were underage, and that some claimed to have been subjected to physical and sexual abuse. This came on top of the allegations of animal mistreatment, environmental pollution, and anti-…

Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

By Joseph Laycock

…interested in empirically questioning a Christian’s experience of the Holy Spirit. But there were still many obstacles to navigate regarding the metaphysical claims of vampires. Of particular controversy was the existence of subtle energy or “psi,” which many vampires claim to feed on. Some of the vampires were quick to point out that I could not really understand their life-world if I dismissed the existence of subtle energy. By contrast, fellow…

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…

A Religious History of American Neuroscience

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…roof for divine realities. Was not the telegraph, for example, a herald of spiritualist communication? The Society of Psychical Research, on both sides of the Atlantic, was enamored with the notion that the new auditory technologies could well yield spiritual dividends. When the telephone appeared on the scene, some in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psycho-phone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the…

RD News Round-Up—September 29, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…nections and theological applications.” Detweiler, co-director of the Reel Spirituality Institute and associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, “uses the IMDb, the wildly popular Internet Movie Database, to select today’s most influential contemporary films. Into the Dark dissects the theology of everyday life, exploring the work of the Spirit of God in creation and redemption to discuss “general revelation” throu…

This is not a Religion Column: Sarah Palin, American

By Jeff Sharlet

…on and her small town roots is the way they seem to merge, the territorial spiritual warfare of her churches phrased in secular terms through her channeling of Pegler. “Territorial spiritual warfare” is the idea, embraced by Palin’s pastors, that entire cities can be possessed by demons. Small towns, too, theoretically, but that’s not usually how it works. The first time I encountered it was at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, in Colorado Springs. W…

Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…Camelot was a “layover on the way to Vietnam.” Maybe so, maybe not. On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy delivered the commencement speech at American University. In the middle of the Cold War, he laid out his vision for a world at peace and how we might get there: “Some say it is useless to speak of peace or world disarmament, and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I bel…

John McCain: No God But Country

By Kathryn Lofton

…or a Suburban. Yet McCain supplies no wake-up call, no re-awakening of his spirit to explicate his substitution of Sunday affections. He offers no specifications of the kind of Christ that pressed him from a the Book of Common Prayer to the Baptist Faith and Message. Nor, as mentioned above, has he shown the increased piety of the convert. When asked how often he attends church McCain says, “not as often as I should.” When asked whether he has par…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…vered in Egypt in 1945, was first published in English by James Robinson in 1977, with a paperback version appearing in 1981. Public awareness about the Nag Hammadi materials grew consistently in the following two decades, but exploded in 2003 with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which, more than anything, showcases Brown’s muddled if provocative incorporation of the Gnostic worldview into the novel. Fans of The Da Vinci Code don’…

A Palin Pastor Primer

By Esther Kaplan

…rch is where David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus, spoke on August 17, with Palin in the pews [see audio]. He told congregants that Palestinian attacks on Israelis were God’s “judgement” of Jews for their refusal to embrace Jesus Christ: “Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. When a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, kill…