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Fear of a New Jewishness

By Jacob S. Dorman

…cially groups that mix Judaism with secularism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism—we might view the Pew Report with considerably less alarm. Instead of thinking of this American Jewish polyculturalism as something new or threatening, and vainly seeking to recreate the nostalgic communities and religious institutions made possible in part by the pressures of persecution, Jews might embrace the rainbow spectrum of Jewish practices and Jewish physi…

Another Slender Man Attack?

By Joseph Laycock

…legend complexes, which become more potent the more discourse is generated about them. If we really want to stop Slender Man’s influence, the best thing we can do is ignore him: Stop putting his image in every article about the stabbings, take down the comments sections littered with screeds that Slender Man is real, and banish him back to the horror “pasta” sites that are his natural habitat. Of course, doing this would require sacrificing our ow…

Speaking for Hinduism in the Absence of a Conversation

By Murali Balaji

…scholarship, including her use of psychoanalysis (long considered a pseudoscience), her misinterpretation of key texts, and an unusually high number of factual inaccuracies (by some independent estimates, up to 500 errors). Doniger had every right to publish her book, and like every academic work, it will have its supporters and detractors. However, by dismissing her intellectual critics outright and not fully explaining the inaccuracies of her b…

Fr. John Dear, Dismissed from Jesuits: “It Is So Strange to Be Hated by So Many Church Leaders”

By Megan Sweas

…i says nonviolence is infinitely creative: you have to pray over it, think about it, talk about it with friends, try experiments with nonviolent conflict resolution. You have to be really centered and on your toes, letting go and forgiving people who hurt you and moving on. It requires constant mindfulness, reflection, inner work and letting go of our violence. Have you gotten to a place of forgiveness with the church? As I have gotten older I rea…

Gambling with God: Ryan Bell’s Atheist Bet

By Linn Marie Tonstad

…exists, and I fail to believe in God, I will experience eternal damnation—about the most significant downside imaginable. If I believe in God, and turn out to be right, salvation and eternal bliss are mine. But if my belief turns out to be wrong – God doesn’t exist—what will I have lost? Not much, in comparison to the risks of not believing in a God who is real. Therefore, Pascal concluded, one should live “as if”—as if God is real, which does no…

Religion without God: “Cults,” Pious Atheists, and Our Own Human Bodies

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…nitions of “religion” are losing hold in diverse Western nations. And it’s about time. Religion can no longer be seen as a “set of beliefs in God,” as conventional wisdom might put it. A global, plural view of religion must rid itself of emphasis on both “belief” and “God.” Instead, we need to look toward those definitions, culled from decades of in depth observations of cultures and societies around the world that point toward the networked syste…

Meditation is Not Religion or Spirituality—It’s Technology

By Jay Michaelson

…that it’s not the catchiest title I’ve ever come up with. I was thinking about Practical Enlightenment, but that sounds a little pretentious. How do you feel about the cover? I’m taking the fifth on this one. The cover art by Cryptik, a California-based street artist, is awesome. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? One of the models for this book is Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, which is one o…

Who Says The “Partly Jewish” Are Bad For The Jews?

By Susan Katz Miller

…I Could Not Be a Christian, explores how he draws on both Christianity and Buddhism. Peter Phan at Georgetown notes that, in Asia, “multiple religious belonging is a rule rather than an exception, at least on the popular level.” And while she ultimately disapproves of this, Catherine Cornille, at Boston College, writes, “More and more individuals confess to being partly Jewish and partly Buddhist, or partly Christian and partly Hindu, or fully Chr…

Do Intelligent People Need Religion?

By Brett Beasley

…ologies can yield interesting results, they obscure as much as they reveal about what it means to be an intellectually responsible religious person. In the end they tend to lapse into the same “tragic absence of curiosity” that plagues popular debates between atheism and theism in our era. “One of the more insidious aspects of today’s public debates over belief and unbelief is that they are often sustained by the illusion that both sides are using…

Rethinking Religion After Latest Holistic Death

By Joseph Laycock

…ch explores ceremonies from world traditions such as shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism that emphasize both preparing for death and gaining spiritual insight through near-death experiences. In audio recordings of the session, Fréchette allegedly states, “The time has come for this body of death that you believe is yours… Death is freedom… death is the truth.” This is not the first time tragedy has resulted from holistic therapies that involve heat and…