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

By Peter Laarman

…ed to larger processes in society, namely the crisis of authority and why anybody should listen to people in authority, or belong to any group that tries to make authoritative claims for individuals, communities and societies. People just don’t trust authority or large-scale institutions in the same way they did 30 or 40 years ago. “In the absence of truly democratic policies that provide equitable access to jobs, housing and education, the social…

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

By Kelly J. Baker

…pes (12 human zombies and 7 zombified animals). In recent months, the company faced controversy over two of its targets, Rocky and Alexa. For many critics, Rocky looked eerily similar to President Barack Obama, and the Alexa character, originally titled “the ex,” seemed to encourage violence against women. Zombification allowed for consumers to act on vengeful fantasies. If they are zombies, violence can’t be wrong, can it? Shooting targets in the…

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

By Max Zahn

…h Tan left Google six months ago, his final official job title at the company still doubles as his nickname: Jolly Good Fellow. Over the course of two phone conversations, RD asked Tan—who was, in fact, quite jolly—if mindfulness is a watering-down of Buddhism, whether meditation can truly save the world, and why he specializes in teaching rich people. You’re one of the only prominent advocates of secular mindfulness who is not white. What’s that…

Mitt, the Marriotts, and Porn

By Joanna Brooks

…the damage it does to the marriages and families of the porn-addicted. Anyone who wants to talk seriously about corporate profits and morality needs to do much better than paint Mitt Romney as a porn accomplice because he sat on the board of Marriott hotels. Who else has made money from the porn industry? If you have profited from the digital economy, raise your hand. After all, it’s pretty common knowledge that porn was the major driver…

Departure of the Queen

By Amina Wadud

…e the shaykh arrives, I continue with my Qur’an reading. I don’t use the tiny mp3 player anymore because this last juz’ includes most of the Qur’an that I have memorized myself, and this is more a review than a simple reflective read. Coming to the end of the Qur’an reading is also melancholy, and I forget why I felt I should rush just a few days ago. How will I put my friend down, except for the many occasions I use it in my work, after this? Oh,…

This Narrative of Death that is So Powerful Among Us

By Daniel Schultz

…every question and the way in which militarism, that ideology, crowds out any commitment to social welfare, or even any compassion that would lie behind a welfare program. So I think it is an elemental distortion of our value system. So it’s not simply that we ought not to have these bases or have these troops or these weapons, it really is the ideology of militarism that pervades everything. For a while I would write a letter of protest every tim…

What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

By Haroon Moghul

…f course Islamophobia. After a long and meandering conversation, in which anything any reasonable person could say was twisted and repurposed (quite a feat in Twitter’s narrow spaces), we got to the issue of Islamophobia.(For which reason you can read this article.) I offered recent Eastern European affairs as an answer to the question, ‘Is there any such thing as Islamophobia in the real world?’ Specifically, this means Bosnia, where tens of thou…

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

…station—on the cold rainy Day 3 of Occupy DC, you might not have noticed anything different from any other day: people with handwritten signs, looking like they’d slept outside. 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 t…

Terror In South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…ow what happened to Walter Scott is because a bystander filmed it with his phone. In making his plea, Pinckney invoked the biblical story of Doubting Thomas, the one of Jesus’s disciples who would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw him with his own eyes and touched his wounds with his own hands. “It was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe,’” Pinckney said of Thomas. Some people, said Pinckney, are like Thomas…