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Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

By Donna Schaper

…own, in the mind-numbing argot of the UN as Intended Nationally Determined Commitments — the climate reductions they are promising don’t go far enough. . . . These unenforceable “commitments” are, at best, a step in the right direction and, at worse, a way for government leaders to try to fool their citizens and, perhaps, themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing. If this sounds familiar, it should: big companies have been promising…

Trump, Islamophobia, and the Philly Pig’s Head Incident

By David Krueger

…in the U.S. to be registered in a database and stop Muslim immigrants from coming into the United States. Upping the ante on Tuesday, he made comparisons between his policies and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy to place Japanese Americans in internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. All of this rhetoric stands in sharp contrast to the values ensconced in the U.S. Constitution which guarantee legal protections for the free exe…

Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

By Peter Laarman

…k millennials ages 18-29 comprise 20% of historically black churches. This number is roughly comparable to that of the baby boomer generation. Thus, religious affiliation for young black adults does not show the same kind of downward shift as that of the non-black population (the data on black children in the generation after the millennials suggest high levels of religiosity as well). African Americans in general, and African-American women in pa…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…cameras, at a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles. Veteran suicides come to outnumber battlefield deaths. Violence shifts even deeper into the realm of psychology: there’s the pervasive fear of a possible strike, existing alongside the lasting legacy of combat. The final chapters of the Hunger Games series concern themselves with trauma and its aftermath, in unusually naked terms (“I still remain struck with the last two chapters. It just w…

“We Blew it” on Climate Change, But May Survive Anyway: An RD Discussion with the First Transhumanist Candidate

By Andrew Aghapour

…ate. You’ve written that we might go so far as to leave our physical forms completely and become “virtual avatars.” Could you explain that? It’s just a matter of time before we figure out how to get every single thought in our head—or at least a basic configuration of our brain—into a machine that actually has consciousness. It might be thirty years out, but it’s a radical change that many are spending a lot of money [researching]—Google specifica…

The Fragility of Our Reality: A Conversation with the Brain Behind PBS Miniseries on Neuroscience

By Michael Schulson

…lashlight around this possibility space.” If I can sit down and make up 40 completely different versions [of the afterlife], then we could, as a community, make up many hundreds and thousands of versions of what might be going on. The important part is the exploration, instead of the pretense to certainty. You have this philosophical commitment to possibility. But there are people trying to get specific moral messages out of neuroscience, too—spec…

When Auschwitz Becomes a Poké Stop

By Karen E. Park

…ry. For years now we have been able to escape our physical spaces with our phones. But Pokémon Go doesn’t just allow us to avoid a “real” place in favor of a “virtual” one. It has instead transformed our real spaces into virtual ones. It may have been bad manners to play video games at a cemetery, or to take a selfie at a funeral, but with Pokémon, the funeral, the cemetery, and now even the Holocaust memorial and 9/11 memorial, have become the ga…

Accused of Anti-Semitism, Trump Aide Makes Ancestry Appeal

By Michael Schulson

…neal descent as well, and there are Conservative and traditionalist Jewish communities that try (often unofficially) to be welcoming to both matrilineal and patrilineal Jews. In other words, there’s not a hard-and-fast, universally-accepted biological rule for what makes someone a Jew. Second of all, American Jews tend to be fairly skeptical toward the idea that you can have (at least) one Jewish grandmother, entirely walk away from Jewish traditi…

“What Kind of Islam Is That?”: Talking With Refugees From ISIS

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…IS forces. When he became a refugee he was able to stay in a slightly more comfortable Christian camp than the one for Arab Muslims; it was set up in what had formerly been a playground next to a Catholic church in the Erbil suburb of Ankawa. The camp consisted of one-room campers instead of tents, supplied by the Christian charity, the Good Samaritans. The pharmacist told us that the Syrian Army had assured them that they would be safe as ISIS ap…

Evangelicalism “Wasn’t Created for Someone Like Me”: Following a Queer Evangelical of Color in the Age of Trump

By Deborah Jian Lee

…but I know this was the right decision. I think most of all, I miss taking communion. I wept quite a bit during communion at the conference hosted by The Reformation Project conference (a group advocating for the inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church). I’m in the wilderness. I’m spiritually homeless, and I think I’m embracing that. I think a lot about Exodus—leaving Egypt and wandering in the wilderness. There is no temple to worship, but we hav…