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End-of-Life Lessons from The Walking Dead

By Ann Neumann

…sorting out their new roles in a constantly shifting group. A conversation about death is a conversation about life, and because The Walking Dead takes place in contemporary Southern America, it’s also a conversation about choice. There’s not a character on the show who isn’t heavily weighed down with it: what weapon to carry, where to get the next meal, who to befriend—hell, where to sleep. In a land where the dead jostle with the living, even li…

Death Without Religion

By Gordon Haber

…eresi’s book to be an intelligent discussion of the limitations of medical science when it comes to death and consciousness; instead it’s a somewhat rambling polemic against the organ donation industry. Teresi does provide an interesting “history of death,” demonstrating the longstanding uncertainty about it. To ensure that a corpse was a corpse, the Greeks severed one of its fingers; the Romans gave the body a rubdown with hot water (better, then…

Win For ‘Natural Family’ Crowd at UN Human Rights Council…

By Peter Montgomery

…president’s visit but says leave “the gay talk” in America. “Let him talk about development; let him talk about cooperation; let him talk about the long-time relationship Kenya has had with America,” he said. “But about our beliefs and culture– keep off!” Obama has used previous trips to Africa to urge governments to respect gay rights. Kariuki said the open letter is a warning to the president. “The family is the strength of a nation. If the fam…

The Protestant Mainline Makes a (Literary) Comeback

By Gary Dorrien

…m). It was hard to debate neoconservatives without coming off as defensive about the shrinking, shrinking, shrinking trajectory of the churches that they derided. But that reflected that I had as much at stake in this many-sided theological, social ethical, and political argument as they did. The new books are coming mostly from scholars who do not carry battle scars from the culture wars. They take a more sanguine view of what happened, suggesti…

Pelosi Attacker’s New Age Spirituality and Belief in QAnon is no Contradiction

By Susannah Crockford

…ed and that ‘Big Tech’ is censoring people. Sprinkled throughout are posts about the myth of the lost continent of Atlantis and contact with aliens, common beliefs in new age spirituality. Posts from 2007, which are still visible, also reference themes in new age spirituality, mostly about the nature of God and how spirituality is different from organized religion. By 2022, the posts had become predominantly occupied with conspiracy theories. A se…

The Gospel Gestalt: From Joyful Noise to Whitney Houston

By Douglas Harrison

…s been more racially complex and culturally polyvocal than most narratives about the music typically allow. In the case of Joyful Noise, complaints about the film making a “mockery of gospel music in the black church” rely on a view of blackness in relation to gospel that is, in its own way, as normative as the film’s underlying representation of whiteness as the corrective to Vi’s old-timey traditionalism. That’s not to say gospel hasn’t often be…

Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…p in heaven. Some are certain of who is going where. But, if we’re talking about what “God’s best” is really all about—I have a feeling that has little, if anything, to do with avoiding controversy, delivering folksy, God is my concierge, feel-good sermons, and getting rich off of a positive thinking message. If this were “God’s best,” I think Jesus would have modeled this in his own life. Maybe I’m being too hard on Osteen, but I freely admit, I’…

Oprah, Terrorist Cells, and the Meaning of Life: An Interview with Paul Froese

By Andrew Aghapour

…of happiness and purposefulness to per-capita GDP. Could you tell us more about that particular study? I’m interested in thinking about how individuals get moral meaning from the world. Moral meaning comes from social sources, whether it’s friends and family or one’s culture, which gives you languages and symbols to talk about these things. It’s hard to measure modernity, and so I looked at levels of per capita GDP, which gives us a sense of a co…

2010: What Did We Believe In?

By Gary Laderman

…esophageal cancer did not tone down the war of words between the two camps about the existence of God, as well as what God should do about Hitchens’ cancer. Even though Stephen Hawking attempted to end the debate with his new book, The Grand Design, no one seemed ready to drop their weapons. Instead, Americans learned this year that they can look forward to the building of a Christian-based theme park in Kentucky called Ark Encounter (based on the…

Can Democrats Question Amy Coney Barrett’s Faith? Yes! Should They? Well…

By Daniel Schultz

…een picked up by some left-wing pundits who otherwise couldn’t give a damn about the life of faith because it gives them the opportunity to wax on about how the Democrats are doing everything wrong. Likewise, what the Biden VP campaign used to refer to as the “bedwetter caucus,” otherwise known as anonymous “senior Democratic strategists” have been out fretting about Dems taking on Barrett’s faith, among other things. All of this is quite ridiculo…