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Does Multiverse Theory Bring Theology Into Science?

…find something to write for a conference on energy, a topic about which I knew nothing at all. One morning, I came across a feature in the New York Times Magazine on “dark energy”: the negative pressure that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe, causing galaxies to race away from one another faster and faster as time goes on. I was struck not only by the metaphorics of this substance (it’s said to be “dark,” “mysterious,” “strange,” “creep…

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Fight the Tower: Protests Continue at Union Theological Seminary

…We’re a New York institution.” The question for Union to consider is which New York it commits itself to? The rapidly gentrifying New York that drives people from their West Harlem homes? The prestigious faith councils of Mayor Bill De Blasio’s New York? Or will Union stand with community organizations like Faith in New York (run by a Union graduate)? Union’s commitment to the city does not mean standing with the Manhattan elite. Students don’t co…

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New York Times Columnist Peter Steinfels’ Letter To RD; With Author Response

…December I looked back over two decades of writing Beliefs columns in the New York Times. One of my abiding themes, I suggested, had been that “the great world religions are complex and multilayered; they are rich in inner tensions and ambiguities that allow beliefs and practices to evolve over time as the faith is tested by new circumstances and insights. The great religions cannot be equated with the diminished and frozen fundamentalisms that t…

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The Master: “It’s Not the L. Ron Story”

…other reason that Anderson deserves recognition as an honorary scholar of new religious movements is that his curiosity about new religions has brought him into conflict with a culture that still approaches the religious other through an un-nuanced “us vs. them” mentality. Most religion scholars who deal heavily with new religious movements have been branded as “cult apologists” at some point in their careers. At stake in this accusation is an as…

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Ask the Dust: Unbelievers, Bunker-Dwellers, Anti-Natalists

…imits and used by the group to make me feel shameful I can’t entertain any new ideas that don’t come from the group or group leader I can’t talk to my parents (I mean more than I couldn’t talk to them before) I’ve developed new coping mechanisms to get through things in the group that make me uncomfortable a la Kimmy Schmidt’s “You can stand anything for 10 seconds. Then you just start on a new 10 seconds.” I’m considering participating in a group…

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Fight the Power: How to Read, and Re-Read, the Book of Revelation

…st after John wrote—maybe 60 years later—there is this movement called the New Prophesy, a charismatic revival movement with both men and women prophets. For them the Book of Revelation tells us that the New Jerusalem is coming soon, Jesus is about to return—and one of the prophets actually says that he returned in the form of a woman. Have you encountered this? A little bit, when I did my work on female prophets. But do we have any sense of what…

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Meditation is Very Relaxing, Says New York Times

…this is a kind of affectation, a tactical deployment of skepticism and I’m-new-to-this innocence. I hope so. The kosher Buddhism presented in “Buddhists’ Delight” is basically relaxation. Not so relaxed that we forget about our liberal political commitments, but relaxed enough that we don’t check our Blackberries when they buzz. Interestingly, right after I read Atlas’ essay, I went to a session at the Mind and Life conference on new clinical stud…

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Dominion Theology, Christian Reconstructionism, and the New Apostolic Reformation

…itten extensively about Reconstructionists and Sarah has written about the New Apostolic Reformation here and here. Moreover Sarah and Anthea Butler have just posted a terrific overview of the NAR, Pentecostalism, and dominionism in which they critique both the denialists who say that dominionism doesn’t exist, and alarmists who fail to properly contextualize dominionists’ activities. Christian Reconstructionism is the older of the two movements (…

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Devil’s Bookmark: Atheism for Smarties

…, and Nietzschean philosophy (James and Freud), man had the need to find a new God. That new God, according to Lukacs, is the omniscient narrator who, god-like, creates worlds and populates them with actors, as well as inventing goals and life-paths for his protagonists, all the while holding the strings in his (invisible) hands. Well, if metafiction is the death of the omniscient narrator, it may well be the death of the God-substitute as well. M…

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But What About the Parents? New York Times Falls Into the Anti-Trans ‘Parents’ Rights’ Trap

…aker’s reporting indicates, because the parents “accepted their teenager’s new gender identity,” even if “not without trepidation.” His mother, after all, was just concerned that the school might be putting her child “on a path the school wasn’t qualified to oversee.” And if parents like her join up with the Christian Right to protect their “parental rights” and start voting for Republicans—as some of the mostly “liberal” parents interviewed for B…

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