Religion Dispatches
…dmired his work, as the administration embarked on an initiative to combat human trafficking. As I wrote yesterday, Giglio—as he acknowledged in his letter today—has already met and befriended the president. White House visitor logs show he has been to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at least twice, and he prayed at Obama’s Easter Prayer Breakfast last year. Perhaps the pair, in the obviously brief encounters they’ve had, never had a chance to discuss t…
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…here I’m addressing myself to my confirmed atheist readers)—that the only true truth is energy and matter in motion—how did you come to believe that? I’m betting that you came to believe it because you believed in the truth of another story. The Truth of Stories—Or Not I should also make clear what I mean by “stories.” Stories are not “just the facts.” In fact, that is precisely what they are not. For our purposes, “the facts” are the empirical fa…
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…ough their churches or synagogues, told me that they joined this or that struggle because they take human beings to be sacred. For a human being to be sacred is for him or her to be worthy of reverent protection from horrors such as murder, destitution, and various forms of domination. Theism is one way of trying to make sense of all this, but not the only way. Part of the function of the concept of sacred value in our discourse is to mark off a z…
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…h that plays out in the drama as Sylar, Claire and other specially endowed human struggle to rid themselves of their difference. Rather, the unsatisfying muddle of the current storyline calls for a Promethean figure, someone unafraid to heed the call of departure from conventional life as well as from the audience’s expectations. What Heroes needs is another Zack, unbound—a heroically transgressive character who will steal fire from the gods and i…
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…nding the future of religion? I think that we are now entering a really disruptive age in the history of human civilization, thanks to the new transparency brought about by social media and the internet. It used to be a lot easier to keep secrets than it is now. In the March issue of Scientific American, Deb Roy and I compare this to the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian Explosion happened 540 million years ago, when there was a sudden, very dramat…
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…lence, but they feel it at what we might call the amygdala level: in the struggle to get ahead in a winner-take-all culture, in the toll that struggle takes in damaging personal relations and susceptibility to addictions, in the deference shown to “superiors” and the contempt directed toward people further down in the pecking order. For many others, the violence of the American caste system is only too visible in the form of militarized policing a…
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…writings, which focus on topics like totalitarianism and violence. In The Human Condition, which is arguably her greatest work, Arendt examines human existence and argues that involvement in politics, which is achieved through public speech and action, is among the highest achievements in life. I have a Master’s degree in political theory and have been a long time admirer of Arendt’s theories on people and politics. Her work, particularly in The…
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…sted by the Security Council, recommends an independent investigation into human rights violations, including a possible referral to the International Criminal Court. Amidst escalating calls for intervention, the UN Security Council met privately on July 15. Senior UN staff publicly called for UN and humanitarian access to the area and expressed concern about the reports of mass graves, extra-judicial killings, and attacks on UN personnel. The Int…
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…. But I respectfully suggest that we keep some perspective. We expect that human beings will affirm what is good, not abdicate their responsibly to do so in the public forum, even if they are the pope, for fear that they will offend those who do not affirm the same goodness. Moreover, the very phrasing of the pope’s seemingly revolutionary comment as a rhetorical question stands in sharp contrast to his usual blunt, declarative approach to economi…
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…ing anyone to project themselves into the space. The Romantics dwarfed the human figure. Kinkade wants the human outside the frame to imagine themselves inside its world. This is coupled with Kinkade’s proclivity, as the “Painter of Light” to depict light coming from within these small buildings, and not, ultimately, from natural sources. Randall Balmer, in a 2001 Christianity Today piece, suggests Kinkade’s art helps point toward a paradise lost,…
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