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Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…nd repatriation are the new buzzwords in American museums, and some of our best museums (the Getty, the Metropolitan, the Cleveland Museum, the Princeton Museum) were recently forced to send a lot of Greek works of art back, not to Greece, but to Rome. It’s all a bit bewildering, but fascinating at the same time. Which leads me to a second project, a book about the Greek island of Crete where I excavated for five years. I want to use Cretan hist…

Do We Owe Human Rights to the Christian Right?

By Austin Dacey

…and 1940s work of French Catholic personalist intellectuals and on the spread of “human dignity” in Western European constitutions, beginning with the 1937 Christian Democratic constitution of Ireland, Moyn concludes that “through this lost and misremembered transwar era, it is best to see human rights as a project of the Christian right for the most part, not the secular left.” Is the advancement of human rights in the 1940s best seen as a proje…

Conventional Wisdom: RNC/DNC Giving God a Bad Name?

By Peter Laarman

…ches.” Well, yes and no. It’s a party that gives Elizabeth Warren a microphone even as it dispatches Rahm Emanuel to make nice with the very same fat cats Warren denounces; that lurches to proclaim Jerusalem the one and only capital of Israel even when it knows how catastrophically wrongheaded this is to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East; that is quite obviously afraid to talk candidly about grinding poverty in America for fear o…

A far-right protestor wears a MAGA tophat with a grim expression.

Conservative Evangelicals Aren’t Hypocrites, They’re Sadists

By Daniel Schultz

…h a rabid culture warrior like Mike Pence in the #2 role. But probably the best evidence for somebody like this would be the ICE raids in Mississippi last week. Here’s Trump the authoritarian carrying out his promise to keep them safe—and the result is a terrorized, deflated community. People notice that kind of thing, especially when their church is called on to assist the victims. And it may never work! All the evidence indicates that there’s a…

How a Pioneer of Branding Invented Christian Fundamentalism

By Daniel Silliman

…at there are huge gaps in what would be a traditional creed. There are any number of points of theology that, actually, most of Christians would see as essential—ideas about who God is, what is the nature of salvation, all of these things—are not brought up. Because they would be too controversial among conservatives. And, when you look at the subjects that are brought up, articles regularly contradict each other. There is no unified creed in any…

Robert Bellah’s Powerful Legacy: A Mixed Blessing for Religious Studies?

By Ivan Strenski

…cal perspective anathema? Why did our data seem limited to American or, at best, North Atlantic, cultural material? Was there really nothing to be learned from rigorous cross-cultural comparison? At other points, however, I think Bellah’s pastoral and prophetic urges undid some of the great good he had done. Perhaps, it was Bellah’s heart-felt concern to make the university a place infused with high moral, even religious, purpose that played him f…

On Death and After-Death

By Amina Wadud

…, you’d know there really is something to this transition. Apparently, the best response is one of surrender. Well, then again, I guess some people would rather go kicking and screaming, trying to resist. Anyway, as I said, my point is about gender and death in the Qur’an. Death is an equal-opportunity supervisor, so every soul will taste it. No special taste on the basis of gender. Thank you very much. We know from the Qur’an that there are two a…

Will Mindfulness Change the World? Daniel Goleman Isn’t Sure

By Jay Michaelson

…ologist for the TED Talk set. And his new book, Focus, is a New York Times bestseller. But before any of that fame, Goleman was a hardcore Buddhist meditator—and remains one today. His early books were about the development of the contemplative path, and throughout his work has run the theme of how meditative practice, in secular or spiritual contexts, can lead to greater happiness and peace—and conversely, how the disconnects in our own minds can…

Jesus’ Language More Complicated Than Experts Claim

By Seth Sanders

…minantly in early Palestinian Aramaic. Indeed, even the name of God in the best-accepted scholarly manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, Codex Leningradensis, is in fact typically written to be read not in Hebrew but in Aramaic: the tetragrammaton (יהוה or YHWH) is predominantly written with the vowels for shma, Aramaic for “the name.” Jewish linguistic practice at the time when the Hebrew Bible’s form was being finalized and the events represented in t…

Marriage is for Everybody, Says Former Anti-Gay Evangelical

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…t of technical scholarly debates about what they did and did not mean. The best you wind up with is a statement that says, “Well, these passages don’t mean what you think they mean.” It was essentially an argument from silence, which I don’t find compelling. As I was writing this I was trying to keep in mind a couple of families in my congregation. They were just regular folks who had children come to them and they were very upset with this. We ha…