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Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…they called religion simply didn’t count. Enter psychologist Steven Reiss’ new book: The 16 Strivings for God: The New Psychology of Religious Experiences. There isn’t just one fundamental desire behind religion, Reiss argues, there are sixteen of them. According to Reiss, all humans have the following innate desires: – Acceptance: the desire for positive self-regard – Curiosity: the desire for understanding – Eating: the desire for food – Family:…

Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…ustin cafe to discuss his project as well as our public conversation about new religious movements. Jones explained that his fictional cult not directly based on Heaven’s Gate, but is inspired by it. Much like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), The Away Team is a fictional story that takes its cues from real life figures and movements. As research, Jones watched “Exit Statements” made by Heaven’s Gate members before their suicide. He also c…

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

By Andrew Aghapour

…ones that are most likely to fall prey to a sense of meaninglessness. Fox News commentators make a big deal out of the fact that poor people in the post-industrial world have so many things that others don’t—refrigerators, televisions, iPhones—and that’s completely true, but what that misses is that those don’t provide meaning for you. Ironically, those things might communicate to people that the world is moving on without them. How does religion…

Reporting from Paris: A Prayer for Polluters

By Donna Schaper

…e a caucus proposed a stop fracking resolution. We spent hours on national phone calls debating when fracking should be stopped. We finally proposed 2030 as the last fracking date. It was a compromise after many “brackets,” what COP21 calls the matters that are kept in that famous parking lot where we put the things we don’t know how to decide. The Synod amended our so-called radical proposal and unanimously passed 2017 as the final date. We were…

Trump, Islamophobia, and the Philly Pig’s Head Incident

By David Krueger

…r not Catholics could really become Americans. Lewis C. Levin, a Methodist newspaper editor in Philadelphia, published several anti-Catholic tracts. In May 1844, he led a mob of 3000 supporters of his newly-formed nativist political party to the middle of a Catholic neighborhood to give an anti-immigrant speech. In the days and weeks that followed, nativist rioters burned down several Catholic churches including St. Augustine’s, its rectory, and a…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles. Veteran suicides come to outnumber battlefield deaths. Violence shifts even deeper into the realm of psychology: there’s the pervasive fear of a possible strike, existing alongside the lasting legacy of combat. The final chapters of the Hunger Games series concern themselves with trauma and its aftermath, in unusually naked terms (“I still remain struck with the last two chapters. It just was so compl…

“We Blew it” on Climate Change, But May Survive Anyway: An RD Discussion with the First Transhumanist Candidate

By Andrew Aghapour

…ould it be fair to say that, just as the Transhumanist Party is bringing a new voice into politics, your own transhumanism is bringing new concepts into spirituality and metaphysics? And that, therefore, the religious elements of transhumanism aren’t inconsistencies, but useful features? I’m very open to Christian transhumanists, Mormon transhumanists. I mean, yes, I might argue against them in my articles but there’s no way that we would ever say…

The Fragility of Our Reality: A Conversation with the Brain Behind PBS Miniseries on Neuroscience

By Michael Schulson

…t trying to rule things in or out?” Sometimes what science does is open up new folds in the possibility space—new ideas that we hadn’t thought of. The cosmos is so much more vast than we’re capable of wrapping our minds around, certainly in 2015, certainly in our brief lifetimes. In Sum, you play these kind of cosmological games—what if an afterlike looked like this, or like this, or like this? In some sense [Sum] is a possibilian manifesto. None…

“What Kind of Islam Is That?”: Talking With Refugees From ISIS

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ago, some were war-weary Syrians who had been nomads for years. A few were new arrivals. One of the newest refugees I talked with was the young Sunni Arab man and his family who had just arrived from the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, that fell to ISIS forces in May, 2015. He said that he and 90% of the population left on one side of the town as ISIS entered the other. There had been heavy fighting, he said, and his own nine-month daughter had b…

A Religious History of American Neuroscience

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…telephone appeared on the scene, some in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psycho-phone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the voices of angels. The psychophone no doubt sounds absurd, but I can’t say that it sounds much more far-fetched than a transcranial magnetic stimulator. Both demonstrate the enduring cultural impulse toward techno-theologizing. However much neuroscientists might want to forswear a…