Religion Dispatches
On April 1, Jake Rush, a conservative congressional candidate from Florida, was outed for his involvement in vampire role-playing games. The story, which was apparently spread by supporters of his opponent, incumbent Ted Yoho, accused Rush of living a “bizarre double life” and dropped plenty of choice words like “ritual,” “occult,” and “Satanic.” Unfortunately for Yoho’s supporters the appeal to moral panic may have backfired. Rush released a st…
Read MoreIn Noah Darren Aronofsky has crafted a provocative cinematic midrash weaving the stories of Genesis and stories from the book(s) of Enoch set in an antediluvian Iron Age. Midrashic commentary traditionally fills spaces in scriptural stories, asking questions of the text, and answering those questions. Aronofsky’s choices create a new interpretation of the story of Noah—neither a good nor a bad thing in itself. Some will care that the movie deviat…
Read MoreMitt Romney’s delusional 2012 pollsters got nothing on apologists for last week’s Pew Poll that found no real “Francis effect” from the pope’s first year. According to Daniel Burke at CNN.com in a lengthy, mostly anecdotal piece, “there’s more way than one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to fin…
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The scene opens in a bustling restaurant in Delhi, where a young woman leans in close to her grandfather, whose eyes sparkle with memories of his childhood in Lahore, Pakistan. He points to faded photograph of two young boys: “This is me. And this is Yusuf.” Every evening they flew kites together, before stealing jhajariyas from the sweet shop owned by Yusuf’s family. A harsh reality interrupts these wistful recollections: “When partition came, w…
Read MoreWhere have I seen this before? Moses realizing his calling, leading his people, parting the Red Sea (only this time with CGI assistance); Samson, falling for Delilah; King David, marching as to war; Jesus (yet another fine-looking white guy), breathless, sexy, mouthing his beatitudes before suffering on the cross; and much, much more. Admittedly, I had not seen Noah (portrayed here by an actor with a fine Scottish brogue) deliver some of the key…
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Unless you have been completely unplugged from all forms of media for the last week, you’ve probably seen—or at least have heard or read about—the interview that religion scholar, Reza Aslan, gave on the FoxNews.com webcast, “Spirited Debate”—or as Buzzfeed put it, “The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done.” If you haven’t had the chance to see it, or if you aren’t able to watch it now (below, right), here’s what happened, briefly….
Read MoreUpdate: The video, which went viral thanks to Buzzfeed, has boosted Aslan’s book sales considerably. According to the New York Times: On Friday, “Zealot” was in the No. 8 spot on Amazon.com, the nation’s biggest seller of books; by Sunday, it had hit No. 1. Random House is rushing to meet the surge in demand for the book. On Monday, the publisher ordered 50,000 copies, bringing the total to 150,000 copies in print by the end of the week. *** Cre…
Read MoreOn June 29, 2013, in heavily Christian Northern Florida, American Atheists will unveil the first public monument to atheism. A bench engraved with quotes from Thomas Jefferson, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Benjamin Franklin, and other atheists and freethinkers will be placed alongside a monument of the Ten Commandments on display in front of the Bradford County Courthouse. How did this come about? As reported by news4jax.com: American Atheists had sued…
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A quick review of Greg Epstein’s Facebook page and Twitter feed shows the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University responding to the needs of his community during a tragedy—providing pastoral care and other services customarily performed by chaplains. On these pages one can find information about vigils, as well as emergency contact information for those students stranded during the city lockdown in the course of the manhunt for the two bombing su…
Read MoreSparked by a Richard Dawkins tweet, in which he drew a parallel between Islamists and (yawn) Nazis, Nathan Lean recently suggested on Salon.com that the most famous representatives of the new atheism “flirt with” Islamophobia [echoing Chris Stedman’s prescient warning to fellow atheists on RD this past August]. As the article explains, Dawkins, Hitchens, and their ilk have had a gleeful decade of “intellectual triumphalism” directed against the r…
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