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Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…basically riffing, or jamming. You know, “What if we thought about it this way? Hey, what would happen if we thought about it this way?” That’s really the spirit of The Passionate Torah—a playground of sorts, a way of experimenting with the questions and issues at hand in the hopes that something new and exciting will result. The academic tone of this book is a pretty big departure from your two previous books, a personal narrative anthology and a…

We Can’t Spiritualize Our Way out of American Polarization

By Chrissy Stroop

…come. And if we want to be able to have these things, then we have to find ways to deal with the structures in our politics that continue to provide disproportionate power to the wealthy and to white men and white Christians. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, the fundamentally unfair nature of the Electoral College, and unfair Senate representation—the factors that allow the white, male, Christian minority to impose its will on the rest of us—nee…

What Role do Feelings Play in Conspiracy, Racism and Climate Denial? Welcome to Phoning It In, Episode 1

By Megan Goodwin

…t genealogy of like Genevieve Lloyd, Susan Bordo, Alison Jaggar, Donna Haraway, Sue Campbell… In much the same way I’m drawing on the resources of queer theory, I’m drawing on the resources of feminist theory, but I’m not really talking about gender directly. Even though I think you’re right to say that the extent to which gender and race are made in part by dividing people into rational and irrational categories—that’s definitely right on the sur…

The Case for Treating Near-Death Experiences Like Acid Trips

By Andrew Aghapour

…way of understanding that doesn’t require appeals to the truth in the same way that explanation does. This way of understanding [involves] emotional patterns. Supernatural explanations may appeal to this side of human nature. They certainly do so much better than the kind of dry, false-memory type of explanation that I was talking about earlier. In the book you argue that LSD trips might be a helpful metaphor for thinking about this difference bet…

Vatican Seeks Virgin Amidst All This Sexual Impropriety

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…It is also the desire for access to a different kind of power, a different way to imagine power, a different way to inhabit and exercise that power. But the attempt to celebrate the possibility of a different kind of power, and a different way to exercise temporal power, always runs up against the old, Pauline problem: that the Church’s treasures are held in clay vessels. This all-too-human institution now confronts the challenge of how best to ge…

Religion in Real Time on CNN’s “Believer”: A Conversation with Reza Aslan

By Kaya Oakes

…that’s adaptive and individualistic and growing so fast, much in the same way the number of “spiritual but not religious” people is growing. Yes, and the exact same thing is paralleled in Scientology. You have a church that is obsessed with maintaining an absolute iron grip over the religion. If you don’t follow Scientology under the church’s guidance, you’re not really a Scientologist. And that again has led to stagnation, it’s led to a massive…

Why Christian Fundamentalism Is Still a Big Deal in U.S. Politics, And How It Got That Way

By Eric C. Miller

…and they’ve worked hard to present themselves as anti-fundamentalist in a number of ways. They appeal to individual experiences of spirituality over rigid doctrinal statements. They use words like “seekers” rather than talking about lost or damned souls. They also tend to avoid rigid political platforms. If you walk through the multiple parking lots at Willow Creek, you can spot bumper stickers that span the political spectrum, and megachurch pas…

The Revolujah! Will Be Performed: Reverend Billy’s Reality Joke

By Nathan Schneider

…e, now. SD: I write in the book a bit about how Billy can be a fake leader for generations who have rejected leadership, or for those who can only perform the role of following. It almost seems like people, especially those that don’t self-identify as religious or political, need a way out of their convictions—a cover, a way to distance themselves from even their own ideology, as exemplified by the success of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s…

The Christian Roots of the New Age: The Aquarian Gospel

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…and spirit. Death is a death in body; for many Gnostics, it was seen as a way to release the soul. (That, by the way, is just how Jesus views the matter in the popular Gospel of Judas, published two years ago: Judas did not betray Jesus, but rather did what Jesus asked him to do, in order to “sacrifice the man that clothes [his spirit].”) According to The Aquarian Gospel, when Jesus prayed in Gethsemane for an escape route, he was praying in bodi…

Do Make Trouble: The Complex World of Radical Jewish ‘Revenge Theologian,’ Meir Kahane

By Shane Burley

…’s never any real theorizing about why it happens or what it means. It’s always in the historical circumstantial register. And yet, I think underlying it is this ontological claim that they never want to actually make. Which is that gentiles are always going to be antisemitic, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Because if you say that then there’s no solution to it. Kahane openly said there was no solution to it. He wasn’t alone, but he popu…