I have a theory: New Year’s resolutions have nothing to do with the turn of the calendar year. There’s a much stronger force at play: that, every December, America collectively visits its family. Every year, millions of families unplug from their day-to-day lives and reunite. Siblings compare their parallel lives. We peruse old photo albums and take mental snapshots of our aging parents, forming a past-and-future flip book of our own aging bodies…
Thank you for your interest in writing for The Cubit! The Cubit covers topics at the intersection of religion, science, technology, and ethics. If you aren’t familiar with our voice, please start with our manifesto, and then check out the collected works. Send pitches to michael@religiondispatches.org. Tell us: 1. A one sentence version of your main argument or idea 2. Background information about the topic at hand 3. Why your idea is a good fit…
Go to the grocery store to buy vanilla extract and you’ll be faced with an ontological choice: natural or artificial? The real stuff—expensive “pure vanilla extract”—is made from the beans of a vanilla orchid that was painstakingly harvested, cured, a shipped across the globe. Artificial vanilla extract, on the other hand, uses synthesized vanillin derived from wood pulp or petroleum. Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads,…
Like marijuana, affect theory seems to pop up at parties, where it circulates within small groups that keep to the periphery. While it isn’t illegal in any of the 50 states—it’s an intellectual approach to emotions, after all, not a controlled substance—it has the aura, especially at academic conferences, of an exciting and risky way to reshuffle your faculties of perception. Also like marijuana, affect theory produces esoteric insights that can…
In a recent BBC documentary, Secrets of the Superbrands, presenter Alex Riley attended the opening of a London Apple store and noted the “evangelical frenzy” of the fans lining the block. At first Riley stayed mostly at the periphery of the crowd, shooting sarcastic looks to the camera and lobbing one-liners about the seemingly religious ecstasy of the “glassy-eyed” consumers being ushered in by a team of Apple’s blue-shirted “preachers.” Enterta…
I have some secrets for you; feel free to tell everyone. Psychopaths have distinct types of brains, and so do left-handed people. Bar Mitzvahs aid myelination, the conversion of gray-matter neurons into white-matter neurons. Bragging makes us feel really good, which is why Facebook is better than sex. If that concerns you, don’t worry, because the pharmaceutical industry is going to save marriage. Shakespeare tickles the visual association cortex…
Social media has made possible a new global distribution of cognitive ephemera. We are tweeting 6,000 times per second—and most of it is garbage. And while social media has facilitated powerful forms of speech that might otherwise be stifled, it favors short snippets and the rebroadcasting of other voices, which isn’t ideal for public discourse. It is also a capitalist project, not a democratic one. Social media will continue to shape the way tha…
Jazz, like religion, eludes strict definitions. It overflows boundaries of genre and form, and, when improvised, is unpredictable and ephemeral. As Jason Bivins documents in his latest book, Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion, jazz musicians share with religion scholars certain anti-essentialist leanings. Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion Jason C. Bivins Oxford University Press (May 1, 2015) The similarities run deeper. Jazz…
