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Not that Kind of Fundamentalist Memoir

By Mandy Van Deven

…ere to rank Bauer’s fundamentalist upbringing on an extremity scale of 1 to 10, I’d likely score it smack dab in the middle. Her non-denominational church was certainly evangelical, putting forth the belief that one must sublimate one’s time, talents, and resources on a ubiquitous quest to, as Saint Paul instructed, die to self. Bauer’s childhood spiritual guides did their part to fill her with rapture anxiety by screening A Thief in the Night, an…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity. Masonic lodges proliferated in America from the 1720s onward. They were a religious movement as well as a social networking sensation, a pre-electronic Facebook. At first they recruited only affluent gentlemen and professionals, then later a broader…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…s to become “legal” because there’s no process for them to do so. There are 12 million undocumented immigrants here now. It is neither realistic nor humane to try to round them all up and deport them. Even if it cost only one thousand dollars each to detain and deport them, that price would be absurd—and it actually costs a whole lot more. And think of the human cost. What would happen to the children they left behind? Or the jobs they left behind…

Evolution and Creation Fight to the Death: What Emerges from the Ashes

By Philip Clayton

…mon ground—are almost nonexistent? When we ran the global “Science and the Spiritual Quest” program just a decade ago, many leading scientists took moderate views. Religion did not need to be destroyed, they told us, as long as the basic conditions for doing science were not undercut. Theologians and religious leaders responded in kind: religionists have every reason to support scientific research and to learn from its results. You’ll have to look…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…hit? People went to fundamentalism and to very anti-intellectual forms of spirituality because that kind of scholarship wasn’t feeding their hunger. There has to be some way, I hoped, of using reason and our analytical skills while also dealing with resonance, mystery, paradox, and conundrum. Literature, it seems to me, is one way. Words like “beauty,” “love,” and “consolation” don’t really have a place in a scholarly diction, and those are terms…

All the Lonely People: Holiday Blues and the Epidemic of Isolation

By Peter Laarman

…lot of it will be empty blather, but we can hope that at least some of America’s pastors will help us think about what showing good will toward all of God’s children actually requires—and (speaking of angels) about how the better angels of our nature can actually be awakened. In that spirit, we and those preachers might well consider the import of this passage from a lovely prayer by Howard Thurman: “Give me the listening ear. I seek this day the…

Evangelical Stephen Baldwin’s Imitatio Christi & “Reality” TV

By Gabriel Mckee

Over the last year or two, I’ve become an unironic, unapologetic fan of reality TV. I know the criticisms—they dumb us down, they elevate public humiliation—but what I’m really interested in is the way shows like Spike’s Joe Schmo Show or VH1’s I Love Money turn into morality plays about the value of friendship and loyalty. In the best reality shows, the initial rush of schadenfreude is gradually replaced with a genuine affection for the “good gu…

Hipsters v. Hasidim Over Brooklyn Bike Lane

By Nathan Schneider

…t bikes,” says Theo Angell, a 41-year-old artist who joined in the December 19 ride. “Bikes pose no threat to anyone.” He concluded that the lanes were removed “for basically religious reasons.” Scratch an apparently religious reason, however, and there is often something more than sheer dogma beneath the surface. The “plague of the artists” prayer, for instance, is as much a reaction to Williamsburg’s skyrocketing rents as to invading interlopers…

Yearning For A God We Can Live With

By Benjamin Weiner

…nister. Michaelson, in his late thirties, is a freelance teacher of Jewish spirituality, known particularly as the leader of Nehirim, an organization fostering spiritual consciousness among GLBT Jews. A poet and prolific essayist, he is also co-founder of the literary journal Zeek, and a regular voice in the Jewish press (and lately the Huffington Post), whose writing challenges the ethnic and mythological components of Jewish identity for the sak…

How Not To Respond to Haiti

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…d, but illness decimated the troops and they finally surrendered on January 1, 1804. Since then, the small island nation’s fortunes have waxed and waned, often in tandem with American military occupation. In this, her story is like many others, deeply saddening, and offering a glimpse into the “dark side” of the European Renaissance (this is the marvelous title of Walter Mignolo’s important book on the ambivalence of European Modernity in the Amer…