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Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

By Peter Laarman

…one is an expert now, and if I don’t know something I can look it up on my phone), globalization (multiple claims to the same authority coming from incredibly diverse sources), and corporate corruption (you win if you cheat, the little guy gets screwed). This translates into religious and spiritual authority as well, what with sex scandals, health and wealth theologies, and various corrupt religious leaders all demonstrating why we shouldn’t take…

Walking Dead and Zombie Ethics, or “Don’t Fight the Zombies. You Can’t Win”

By Kelly J. Baker

…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …

“Even the Rich Suffer”: An Interview with Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Chade-Meng Tan

By Max Zahn

…ber the source of the teachings. You’re saying that modern mindfulness has lost contact with the source teachings? Absolutely. No doubt about it. Didn’t you help to bring that about? I hope not. The part that doesn’t concern me about the watering down of mindfulness is the intention of the practitioner. You go to Google and more than half the class is practicing mindfulness in order to become more successful. Is that a problem? I would say it’s no…

Departure of the Queen

By Amina Wadud

…ng out to a tent set in the yard out front. Perhaps what I am feeling is a loss from all this company celebrating this time with the Queen. She has not yet departed after all, and we are still honored by her visit. Perhaps it is the deafening silence of being so removed from the hustle and bustle of the cities and even from my own family that makes me feel a bit melancholy. I should probably catch ride outside the gates of the estate where I can h…

This Narrative of Death that is So Powerful Among Us

By Daniel Schultz

…ratives. Walter: By which you mean… Dan: Trying to restore to restore that lost framework… I’m not really sure what I mean by that! Walter: As a teacher and a preacher my job is to line the world out in those categories, and then the listener can decide whether that’s literal, whether that’s historical, whether that’s metaphorical. I think it’s all of those, I think it’s none of those, and I don’t have to answer for that. Dan: Your job is to recov…

Why We Can’t Afford to “Wait And See” How Trump Dismantles LGBT Rights

By Sunnivie Brydum

…tic to oppose LGBT equality, as Salon explains. Just three years ago, on a phone call with faith leaders supporting the Tea Party movement, Price agreed that there are “consequences of activity that has been seen as outside the norm,” suggesting that increased health care costs for LGBT people are a result of some abnormal activity. (Yes, that’s code for anal sex. Or gender-affirming surgeries. Or marrying the person you love most in the world, if…

What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

By Haroon Moghul

…ience for Frazier’s, and yet we spy similarly sloppy claims. If you pay close attention, Islam and Muslims are frequently dismissed and derided by a range of voices from the left to the right—Bill Maher to Newt Gingrich. We need only look to the 2012 presidential campaign, especially on the Republican side, to see how terrible this conversation became. To this end: Because Muslims are assumed to be an “other,” they are exempted from Americanness…

A Sacred Encounter with Erykah Badu’s Controversial Nude Video

By Tamura Lomax

…loop in the background of the newsroom—speaks to a much larger issue: the loss of control of black bodies that have historically been regulated through both verbal and visual representations. This reality cannot be ignored. Historical ideas on race and gender have viciously consumed black subjectivity, chewed it up and spit it out as a new creation—a market piece with a mythical identity, name and meaning. These ideas cross-pollinate the social-c…

How (and Why) A Determined Sit-In Worked

By Daniel Schultz

…’ offices pretty much go directly in the trash. They pay more attention to phone calls and letters, but street protests don’t bother them at all, unless they’re on cable news, which they almost never are. Hashtags? Changing your Twitter avatar? Forget about it. Popular protest does play a supporting role in getting us to a point where something like the Congressional sit-in works. So do the organizations—including the religious groups—who sponsor…

Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC

By Sarah Posner

…ide. Others emerging from the Starbucks across the street, talking on cell phones or carrying laptops. Conversations on the park’s benches. For a city accustomed to itinerant protesters, a population glued to mobile devices, as well as the homeless sleeping in the shadows of the halls of power, it quite possibly looked like any other day in the heart of the nation’s capital. That passersby appeared to ignore the protesters was appropriate: Occupy…