Religion Dispatches
…endment issues against the inclusive learning environments they purport to uphold, maybe they should just start with a simple Google search before inviting campus speakers….
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…he Dark Night artists are, but the struggles with pain and suffering and a search for liberation are shared across the centuries. Iggy Pop’s contribution to the album is a song called “Pain,” which tells us, “Justice, religion, and success are fake/ And the shiny people stink/ Pretty creepy, pretty funny/ I’m a mix of god and monkey.” Such lines are challenging in light of the suicides of both Mark Linkous (a.k.a. Sparklehorse) and Vic Chesnutt, w…
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…of the writer of Hebrews, who gave up all they knew and all they owned in search of a better country. An act of faith. And of desperation. As one man told NPR, “There is no Plan B.” As another, who worked closely with Camping, explained, “if you boil everything down it’s really trusting the Bible. If you can’t trust the Bible, then you got nothing.” And now that’s what they have. Camping’s apology wouldn’t do these people any good now. It wouldn’…
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…ogle Nose Beta, a “flagship olfactory knowledge feature” allowing users to search for smells (like dogs acquire their information); and a second video celebrating the launch of “Treasure Mode” on Google Maps, a digitized version of Captain Kidd’s long lost treasure maps, complete with pirate ship tracking feature and sepia-toned street view overlay. The treasure map, once decoded, spelled out “April Fools.” Were They Kidding with Scope Bacon? Yes….
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…ey announced it to the world’s media outlets before doing so, and a Google search will quickly show how proliferous is the depiction of that destruction. Or, here is an image made of pious Dutch Reformers in the sixteenth century, smashing a Marian statue in a church—the artist captures the carefully orchestrated mob just as they tear the statue down. Tradition is itself a series of creative and destructive acts, stability and instability; the i…
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…ment, over the last forty years American studies and cultural studies have searched mightily for the intriguing crevices of commercial Teflon. They do so even as many of their colleagues shake their heads, mournfully. Since when did it become our job to make the popular seem smart? Every field in the humanities has popularizers, and every field has its cultured despisers of those popularizers. No matter your position in that disdain game, it’s har…
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Search the internet for “religion AND science,” and you’ll find plenty on creationism, Richard Dawkins, and the so-called “God spot” (where the brain seems to process religious experiences). You will also find heaps of commentary, most of which assumes either that Religion and science can never peacefully coexist, or that Religion and science get along just fine. Here at The Cubit, Religion Dispatches’ new religion and science portal, we view muc…
Read More…More Muslims participate in the fast than any other ritual. Let’s get the numbers in our head then: of the 1.3 billion Muslims, if less than half are children and even children fast, then you could say almost a billion Muslims are fasting. I don’t think we can make a case about Ramadan and what ever number of incidents that might occur due to some individual Muslims. There is no statistical corollary between fasting, Islam, Muslims and the (still…
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…its eponymous hero, a super-surgeon played by Benedict Cumberbatch, as he searches for mystical wisdom against a backdrop of martial arts and vaguely Eastern architecture. In the original comics the destination was a fictionalized Tibet. (Marvel claims that the film version is built around Celtic mythos, and was recently accused of “whitewashing” for casting Tilda Swinton to play a Tibetan character.) Westerners have a history of portraying the O…
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…not account for “emotional intelligence” or “creative intelligence” the researchers persists in using the term “intelligent people” to describe only those people with higher analytical abilities. Even more questionably, it reduces religion to either a measurable level of belief in the supernatural or participation in religious ritual. That the study’s logic is circular (if religion is intuitive and intelligence is analytical, how could they possi…
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