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Hamlet’s Wager, or, The Ghost of Capitalism

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…then the whole problem of the Modern age appears in a new light. The late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, published a book with the provocative title, Specters of Marx. And it is Karl Marx, of all people, who seems to be the last philosopher to see the problem of ghosts as the real problem lying at the heart of Hamlet’s despair. How so? Because Modern capitalism depends upon specters and ghosts. It hinges on the belief in a kind of value you…

Vietnam, the Analogy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…66, President Johnson significantly upped the military ante, and the troop numbers, committing the US to an all-out land and air assault; that was when the staggering casualties, on both sides, commenced. The analogy as I have set it up paints President Obama in the role of John Kennedy, young and charismatic and new to office, receiving some pressure from his military advisors to commit to an Iraq-style “surge” in Afghanistan. Other close advisor…

Addressing the Culture War Without Touching the Culture War

By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

…rights, rationality, the scientific method and male leadership. Unlike the French Republican tradition, the American Enlightenment involved a “cordial working relationship” with the dominant religious group; namely, Protestants. According to Marsden, despite the diversity of nineteenth century Protestant movements, most of its adherents held a high regard for natural science, self-evident rights, and human liberty, all of which created an overlapp…

Red Riding Hood Arouses Man’s Inner (Were)Wolf

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ue has sharpest tooth!” (That’s Orenstein’s brilliant translation from the French). We probably all remember what the Grimm brothers hung on the architecture of that strange tale. The red hood has become a red cap. The girl is invited by the wolf to gather a bouquet of flowers to take to her grandmother. And after the wolf has devoured both the grandmother and the girl, he falls into a noisy, snoring sleep. The noise attracts the woodman who, sens…

Before Oprah, There Was the “Hour of Power”: Crystal Cathedral Pastor Robert H. Schuller Has Died

By Cathleen Falsani

…gle man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral,” the French poet Antoine de Saint-Exupery, wrote. When the Rev. Robert H. Schuller saw the concession stand of a southern California drive-in movie theater in 1955, his imagination bore the blueprints for a crystalline cathedral and thoroughly-modern ideas about spreading the Christian Gospel via television. Schuller, founder of the now-defunct Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove,…

Cozy Cottage or House on Fire? Thomas Kinkade’s Theo-Aesthetic Legacy

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…nst the overly rational approaches of the Enlightenment; the Terror of the French Revolution, the spoils of industrialization, and war across Europe left many balking at the so-called progress of the rational mind. Poets like Goethe and Shelley, and philosophers like Schiller, Kant, and Schlegel began to pay attention to the emotions, to intuition, and to aesthetic experiences that weren’t comprehensible by rational means. The Romantic-infused the…

Unauthorized Catholic Immigrants will Renew a Christian America, Archbishop Says

By Marie Friedmann Marquardt

…this plan was made evident not only in the missionary zeal of Spanish and French Catholics, but also in the founding documents of U.S. government; drafted, of course, by Protestants: G.K. Chesterton said famously that “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.” And that “creed,” as he recognized, is fundamentally Christian. It is the basic American belief that all men and women are created equal—with God-given rights to…

Church of Pain: Religion, Ritual, and the Body in the New Serial Spin-Off, “S-Town”

By Spencer Dew

…isode we learn that the man who so despised tattoos, but had a significant number of them, acquired most of them in a short period of time, and acquired many through a particular practice in the back room of his own clock workshop. Paying one hundred dollars an hour to a tattoo artist, McLemore submitted to the needle, sometimes for a new piece, sometimes merely for more ink on top of old, a tattoo sunk on top of an existing tattoo, turning his bo…

UPDATE: An Abrupt End to Quebec Separatist Plan to Ban “Ostentatious Signs” of Religion

By Jeremy Stolow

…sted that the bill was crafted to avoid ruffling the feathers of the large numbers of practicing Christians currently working in Quebec’s public sector—a less than insignificant number of which do happen to wear (typically small) crucifixes—and thus the visual code aimed its sights more narrowly on undesirable religious minorities, while at the same time allowing the government to proclaim the even-handedness of its approach. But whatever the act…

What Robot Theology Can Tell Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…any reason to doubt them, unless you count Siri on all those theological iPhones), the entanglement of robotics and Christianity has a longer history than you might think. How machinelike are we humans? For centuries, the Catholic Church was the main patron of automata—elaborate mechanisms, often driven by springs, that were the precursors to present-day robots. “Not only did automata appear first and most commonly in churches and cathedrals, the…