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Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…well-researched and elegantly written account of German occultism from the 1870s through the 1940s. More generally, another recent book that impressed me in terms of ambition and argument was Kris Manjapra’s The Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire. It’s a model of transnational scholarship, but also makes a number of fascinating claims regarding the mutual cultural and intellectual affinities among German and Indian…

Weeks After Turkey’s Failed Coup, Thousands Have Been Arrested Over a Book

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ideaway. All of this happened before the attempted coup this summer on July 15. As coups go, it was a botched affair almost from the beginning. Units of the military cordoned off a bridge across the Bosphorus in Istanbul in the early evening when the streets were still crowded. A military helicopter bombed the parliament building in Ankara during the night when it was empty. Erdogan, who was at a resort in the coastal town of Marmaris, escaped cap…

Will Pope’s African Tour Change Attitudes on Divorce and LGBTQ Among African Catholics?

By Kaya Oakes

…cs in Africa has gone through a startling increase in recent decades. Since 1980, the number of African Catholics has grown by 238%, in contrast to Europe, where it has grown by only 6%. Some of this may be attributable to higher fertility rates in African countries, but it also reflects the church’s success in missionary efforts. And where there are a decreasing number of vocations to the priesthood in Europe, where vocations have declined by 23%…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…umference, putting pi at 3. A Babylonian clay tablet from somewhere between 1900 and 1600 BCE sets the constant at 3.1250. An Egyptian papyrus from 1650 BCE goes with 3.1605. In 250 BCE, the Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered a geometrical approach to calculating pi, proving that pi is somewhere between 3.1408 and 3.1429. Today, supercomputers can calculate over 13.3 trillion digits of pi. It’s not just mathematicians who seem to be entranc…

Lying about Santa: The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

By Nathan Schneider

…n a neighborhood bar. But there it is: anything to get us into the holiday spirit. Soon it became evident that none of the other young Brooklynites around me (who were, informal polling later on revealed, entirely childless and, it was safe for the lecturer to assume, mostly godless as well) came for hard-hitting proof. When the promised proof never actually appeared, the crowd, as Cahn might have predicted, didn’t seem to mind. Baby Jesus’ Materi…

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…iesel pleaded with Israel not to deport the children. “Where is the Jewish spirit, the Jewish heart and the Jewish compassion?” The sides were protagonists in an age-old Jewish dispute. Shas’s Yishai represented the particularistic, parochial protector of Jewish continuity from the ravages of assimilation and intermarriage. Wiesel et. al. took the side of the Jewish universalist, extrapolating lessons from the Jews’ long history of painful deporta…

The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

By Patricia Miller

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

American Missionary Could Face Genocide Charges, But Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Have a Bigger Problem

By Amy Fallas

…st Alexander Hinton, Brazil’s indigenous groups decreased by up to 80% from 1900 to 1957 due to “disease.” In fact, advocacy organizations such as Survival International and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs formed during the 1960s in response to this drastic depopulation and widespread violence against native groups in the Amazon. These organizations, along with FUNAI (founded in 1967), continue to advocate against over-extracti…

Protest Greets the Honoring of Rev. H. Eddie Fox at Emory’s Candler School of Theology

By John Blevins

…ageous and to decide if it is willing and able to accept LGBT folk without reservation so that our voices might actually be heard in these seemingly endless conversations that are part of the Church today. It’s time for Emory University to clarify the tension between its own non-discrimination policy and that of the United Methodist Church. And when Candler decides to come down on the side of honoring denominational policy in violation of universi…

Will Internet Kill Mormonism Too? Or Just Missionaries?

By Holly Welker

…ch to missionaries to investigators, I’ll give it a cautious thumbs up. My reservation is that I worry about the effects of this approach to missionary work on the missionaries. The article mentions that missionaries spend “11 hours a day, six days at a stretch” in front of a computer. Given that sitting is supposedly the new smoking, I see this as a very serious health threat for the 18- to 21-year-olds who constitute the bulk of the missionary f…