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Unreasonable Doubt: Vincent Bugliosi Defends Agnosticism

By Eric Reitan

…cludes, I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. Does Bugliosi wrestle with these kinds of argument? No. The closest he comes is…

Degrees of Separation

By Amina Wadud

…ication makes to the ways that women and men think. Anyway, in case you are wondering, as I did then, the word did get across that we had no sound, and I prayed the last two units and then went home to ponder this situation. How the word got across is a mystery to me and it is this that prompted my entry today. I still have no idea who and how the word got across. If it were more than a speaker not working what would we do I wonder? What would I d…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…ident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word. More truth and light: these are watchwords for real Protestants. Nothing between me and God’s Word, which is by no means the same as the much-translated and much-debated words contained in the 66 books. (This is one of the reasons why it has always been difficult for me to accept the idea that biblical literalists are actually Protestants at all in any meaningful sens…

American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence

By Michael A. Elliott

…ost basic of human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.” Stories of disease are also frequently stories of the divine. Wald reminds us that in works like The Iliad and Oedipus Rex, “plagues are the language of the gods’ displeasure.” There, transgressions of the divine unleash deadly contagion, a mytheme that would be grafted onto the scientific storyscape in the twentieth century. Our contemporary version of this narrative eleme…

‘How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World’: An Interview with Author Elle Hardy

By Katherine Stewart

…ential, particularly in the global south. It’s changed politics around the world. In Nigeria, for instance, it has significant political sway. In order to get the support of powerful preachers, political figures (even Muslims) have accepted that the world is defined as a spiritual battle between good and evil. How is the Pentecostal idea of spiritual battle substantially unique? This kind of demonology allows people to merge traditional cultural b…

When Auschwitz Becomes a Poké Stop

By Karen E. Park

…escapism, where I’m like ‘let me just go catch some Pokémon and ignore the news.’” What news is she talking about? The murders of Sterling and Castile and the Dallas police officers. She is referring to the news of death. But in a matter of days Pokemon Go has changed our relationship with death. This is new territory. 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 “re…

2010: What Did We Believe In?

By Gary Laderman

…ck over the course of this year—especially since one of the most important news stories was the passage of health care reform. A simple effort to ensure health insurance coverage for all Americans turned out to be not that simple at all, and created a firestorm of opposition with cries of a socialist takeover and the infamous charge of government-controlled death panels determining who lives and who dies. The ferocious battle over this legislation…

Are They Jewish Bones? Battle for Separation of Synagogue & State in Israel

By Shalom Goldman

…ious issues in Israel. Speaking from Barzilai Hospital, Livni called the struggle over the site of the ER “a struggle over Judaism and not against Judaism… The issue is not just about the Barzilai Medical Center… but over the way decisions are made in Israel.” A week into the controversy, revulsion against Orthodox activism was being expressed often and forcefully. In an editorial titled “Unenlightened in Ashkelon,” Haaretz noted that by endorsin…

The Top 10 (Non-Religious) Religious Films of 2017

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…usually a bit of both. It may sound strange to say, but in an era of fake news and truthiness, we might need the lights of fiction now more than ever. Yes, for a kind of escape (though the belief in cinema simply as escapism is a dangerous tale), but also for testing, trying, experimenting, becoming other. In the cinema we are given the point of view of someone else, made to feel what someone else does, prompted to become part of the stories play…

Savoring the Haterade: Why Jews Love Dara Horn’s ‘People Love Dead Jews’

By Shaul Magid

…n that proves the rule. Or is it that he challenges her thesis? Compelling stories, laconic, and beautifully constructed with a gifted hand. But also pretty disturbing, not because the outcome is always the same—Jews are killed and those who killed them memorialize them—but because the project itself speaks to a deep-seated problem of Jews today: the most successful way to convince someone to be a Jew is to tell them that everyone hates them, prom…