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You Are More Than Your Brain: A Revolutionary Theory of Consciousness

By John Stoehr

…ople hold religious sentiments of one kind or another. Even if they don’t, Western culture stands on a deep-seated conviction that humans are more than the sum of their parts. Claiming authoritatively that we’re just brains in vats is an indirect challenge to such sentiments. That same spirit of subversion has been behind a recent wave of books lambasting religion. Yet the ascent of thinkers like Dawkins, Dennett, and Sam Harris is just one more c…

The Deadly Burqini, Or, What Exactly is an “Islamic Swimsuit”?

By Shabana Mir

…can’t pass laws or rules against their use of public spaces. This is what Western democracy and pluralism is all about. There are choices you can make about who to be, and how. As long as those choices do not harm others around you, one choice should be equal to another. Whether I keep my maiden name or change it, whether I wear pants or a skirt, whether I live with my parents or by myself, whether I ride a motorcycle or drive a car, I should not…

Aung San Suu Kyi: The Verdict is Unfair

By Juliane Schober

…use of salient Buddhist narratives to convey to Burmese audiences, and to Western activists, her vision of civil society and moral authority. Reminiscent of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” her Letters from Burma present persuasive parables on contemporary Burmese society. Her essay “In Quest of Democracy” places the Burmese movement for democracy during the late 1980s in a Buddhist context: The Burmese people go to the heart o…

Oh My God(dess)! Feminist Spirituality in the Third Wave

By Mandy Van Deven

…Studies. Did you intend for the book to focus primarily on newly-developed Western forms of Goddess spirituality, witchcraft, and paganism? Actually I did not intend this. It is simply how it turned out based on the response to my call for papers. In hindsight, though, I think it makes sense. The term ‘feminist spirituality’ does, for some, mean ‘alternatives’ to mainstream religion. Thus people working on third wave feminism within Christianity o…

Sex Comes For the Archbishop: Rembert Weakland’s Unflinching Memoir

By Mary E. Hunt

…f Africa and Eastern Europe, all over Latin America, as well as throughout Western Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. It read like good training for being Pope, if you ask me. Weakland was a contemporary and friend of the Jesuit’s beloved leader Pedro Arrupe. It was Rembert Weakland who gave Thomas Merton’s still-warm body the last rites when he died in Thailand. Benedictine life obviously agreed with him since it allowed him a long leash…

Killing One Primate to Save Another: The Ethics of Animal Rights

By Arri Eisen

…foes. Instead, let’s talk about animal research, ethics, and religion. We Western humans of the Judeo-Christian tradition have come a long way in our understanding and engagement with non-human animals. Crudely put, we realize now that animals are not put here for us to use as we please. And, due in many ways to animal rights activists, research on animals is now done exponentially more carefully than at any point in the history of such work. Whe…

Jesus Goes to the Dark Carnival: Hell House Gets a Makeover?

By W. Scott Poole

…own Christian horror show. Hell houses spread throughout the Southern and Western United States garnering lots of attention and claiming plenty of converts. In 2001, filmmaker George Ratliff took notice of the phenomenon in his wonderfully rendered documentary Hell House. In the last decade, a new version of the Hell House, a softer and gentler version, has appeared known as “Judgement House” (yes, always judgement with two ‘e’s…

Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

By Gary Dorrien

…ely an extreme version of normal American supremacism, one that explicitly promotes and heightens the U.S.’s routine practices of empire. But it matters greatly whether the American empire tries to work cooperatively and respectfully with other nations instead of conspiring mainly to dominate them. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East as a whole, the legacy of George W. Bush is not very good, and Obama has an overabundance of leftover c…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…I hope readers note that there is a Highway 666 that runs through several western states. Not surprisingly, hosts of urban legends have grown up around it. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Definitely Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God became a National Icon. I obviously love this kind of national history, and it amazes me is how he manages to write not only a history of Jesus in American culture, but really…

Single Greatest Idea Ever: On the 150th Anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species

By Lauri Lebo

…e ground for the battle over religion versus science. (In a 2006 survey of Western nations, Turkey was the only country in which fewer people accepted evolution than in the United States.) According to Ron Numbers’ The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, in the wake of the publishing of Origin, Christians in America were, for the most part, able to make peace with Darwin’s theory and evolutionary principles. It wasn’t…