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Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…commonly held notion of heaven is that when we die, we’ll see our beloved parents, grandparents, spouses, friends. Our songs and our dearest hopes are built around this notion. But as Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang point out in their wonderful book, Heaven: A History, this idea of a social, or domesticated heaven, is a relatively recent invention—an idea that really took root around the time of the Civil War. From the beginning, heaven was a…

Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

By Mark Hulsether

…e relative loss in the share of eyeballs captured by televangelists, as compared to other parts of right-wing media. It’s not that ideas like Robertson’s have stopped circulating or that White evangelicals have stopped being the GOP base—but this loss does relate to the rising demographic trend of people becoming religious “nones,” due to widespread disgust with Robertson’s brand of Christianity. Overall, though, I think this piece holds up quite…

Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…others’ views. Blaming the Victims In spite of all caution against drawing parallels between past and present events, the resonances between Lisbon and Haiti are irresistible. The idea that sin produces natural devastation reigns in the land of Pat Robertson. The move to blame the victims is just too tempting. Like the Wesleys before him, Robertson issues a call for repentance in the face of divine judgment. Like the Wesleys in their anti-Catholic…

Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart

By Haroon Moghul

…me, and it was an issue I thought I could lend my voice to in a satirical space. Were there any particular misconceptions or fears you wanted to address? There was a lot of stuff about Shari’ah Law, the protests against the mosques, the standard stuff—the stories that kept coming up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJQr1Go9ldw&t=2s You work as an actor, a writer, a comedian, in a lot of creative spaces. What’s the line between free speech and bigo…

Another Manufactured Outrage: Rep. Ilhan Omar Did Nothing Wrong in Listing Hamas, Israel, and U.S. Together

By Joshua Shanes

…more effective if it were honest. And perhaps that would have lessened the number of death threats and other vile correspondences she has received. Second, others have said that she deserved the criticism for its political harm, that this hurts the Democratic party. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make much sense either, because the manufactured outrage made it worse. If a Democratic leader had privately contacted her and said, “Ilhan, you have to clari…

The 17th Century Roots of Roy Moore’s Refusal to Concede the Election

By Karen E. Park

…crowd by saying: But we also know that God is always in control. You know, part of the thing—part of the problem with this campaign is we’ve been painted in an unfavorable and unfaithful light. We’ve been put in a hole, if you will. And it reminds me of a passage in Psalms 40. I waited patiently for the Lord. That’s what we’ve got to do. And he inclined it to me, heard my cry, brought us out of a horrible pit out of clay and set my feet on the roc…

Diplomatic Suckerhood: Why Israel Is Fighting Toward its Own Demise

By Ira Chernus

…. Instead Israeli leaders play on the voters’ fears (what Rosenblum calls “paranoia”) by promising the other side of the coin: a more aggressive stance. They insist on expanding settlements, for example, even though Israel stands to lose far more than it can gain. Two Israeli academics now have statistical data to confirm that fear has largely muted the Israeli public discourse on peace. The study, by Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal and Dr. Eran Halperin, sh…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…, “For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.” For Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s music could serve as a “signpost to a new consciousness” by challenging the listener to become “an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.” As the world’s most popular cult band, the Grateful Dead developed an extremely loyal and devout fan base that literally spent t…

Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…y unimpressive goal, really), but to continue the process of unfolding Torah, of uniting Heaven and Earth. The great 20th-century theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, and I count feminism, and feminism’s impact on Judaism, as part of that. In other words, the religion we have today and the questions that define it are very much a result of the feminist revolution, and I think Judaism is, as a result,…

Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

By Peter Montgomery

…homosexuality. Churches’ financial success brings added clout to anti-gay pastors like Martin Ssempa—who drives his congregation into a frenzy by showing explicit and extreme gay pornography—and the politicians allied with them, like David Bahati, the sponsor of the kill-the-gays bill. Also appearing in the film is American anti-gay activist Scott Lively, who blames homosexuals for the Nazi movement and Holocaust. In the U.S., Lively is a margina…