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Ross Douthat’s Rosy Old-Time Religion

By Jerome E. Copulsky

…me A Nation of Heretics. While Douthat’s own hero-poet is W. H. Auden, the New York Times’ conservative Wunderkind also finds a nation in crisis. Douthat perceives in the financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath a more troubling symptom of American decline. And, like Eliot, he regards our manifold problems—political, social, economic—rooted in a deeper spiritual crisis: the slackening of Christian “orthodoxy” and the turning away from the virtues…

A New Book Traces the Influence of Racism and Imperialism on White Christian Feminism

By Caroline Matas

…f them chose to turn their attention to domestic Christianization as their new mission front. During a time of heated schisms among fundamentalist and evangelical groups and amidst the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan rallying against immigrants, people of color, Catholics, and Jews, mainline Protestant women’s church councils increasingly emphasized interdenominational, interreligious, and interracial cooperation. Mainline Protestant women’s organi…

Little ‘Value’ in New Harris Book

By Michael Ruse

…degree in philosophy from Stanford—has turned his attention to ethics in a new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. As the subtitle tells us, he argues that we can put moral reasoning on an objective footing. According to him, we have been quite mistaken in thinking that matters of fact and matters of value are two separate things. David Hume was wrong when he said we can never legitimately go from the way things are…

“We’re Not Fighting About Politics, We’re Fighting About God”: Diana Butler Bass Wants a Revolution

By Jesse James DeConto

…in this muddiness, this liminal zone of human relationship, that something new is being born, new life is being fashioned—and we don’t know what that’s going to look like yet. The liminal place can’t stay liminal forever, even though it feels like it in a postmodern age – it feels like we’re going to be living in fluidity for the next-however-long it’s going to be. We are human beings, and we build things. The question that I have is: Can we build…

The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain and Michelle Goldberg

…drawing from Hugh Urban’s work here. He has suggested that tantra and the new age movement intersect where bodily, sexual, and material enjoyment are integrated into spiritual pursuits and that, simultaneously, this integration reflects an intersection between tantra and contemporary consumer culture. In other words, what the New Age movement shares with consumer culture can be found in tantra, the preeminent South Asian model of nondualism. In m…

Who’s Afraid of Sacred Soccer?

By Gary Laderman

…uddhists are doing that—nor is it only spirituality vaguely conceptualized—New Agers with crystals, meditation retreats for the professional class. Instead, both old and new media have lit up the religious landscape, illuminating what is still an unconventional, and nebulous, but certainly increasingly capacious, understanding of the sacred in everyday life. Rock and roll can be religious, according to The Hold Steady; a recent Los Angeles Times a…

Transgender, Scientologist, “Cult Hero”

By Jay Michaelson

…ous or dogmatic reason. His words were valued in the same way as, say, the New Age ‘Law of Attraction’ (formerly known as New Thought): based on their supposedly demonstrable truth, not their religious authority. The devotion of Scientologists to Hubbard may have been weird, slavish, and naïve—but it wasn’t really religious. Or was it? Scientology was intentionally designed to comfort the afflicted, just like religion does. And, just like religion…

In the Story of the New Testament We Are the Romans—No Matter Who Wins the Election

By Stephen Hinerman

…I heard something that changed my whole perspective on the gospels in the New Testament. The biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan was speaking about the narratives of the life of Jesus, so central to that Bible and how people in the church hear them. Then he made this simple observation: “We keep thinking we’re the Jesus people in the story. We’re not. We’re the Romans.” Maybe most people listening thought nothing of the statement. Perhaps they…

The Cubit Vs. “New Age Colbert,” JP Sears

By The Editors

…el, AwakenWithJP, where he’s developed a following for his wry send-ups of New Age culture via his alter ego “Ultra Spiritual” JP Sears, a kind of Stephen Colbert for the New Age set. Dressed in a purple T-shirt and pale green headband, with a flower tucked into his chest-length red hair. Ultra Spiritual JP delivers earnest, convoluted advice on everything from vegetarianism to ayahuasca to the psychology of the selfie, all in pitch-perfect deadpa…

Religious Traditionalists Resist Marriage Equality, Artist Questions What Is “Un-African” & More in This Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…istribution of Disney’s new “Beauty and the Beast” movie based on what the New York Times describes as “a seconds-long glimpse of a gay character near the end of the movie dancing with the object of his affections.” Milonov’s letter to the Russian Culture Ministry blasts the “obvious, blatant, shameless propaganda of sin, of perverted sexual relations.” More from the Times’ Ivan Nechepurenko: Fighting homosexuality has been a recurrent theme for M…