Neal Pollack Has Written a Jewish Basketball Noir Novel
What happens when a culturally Jewish writer learns that Jews once ruled basketball.
Read MoreBooks
Rejecting Blood Sacrifice Theology, Again
What I started out writing, churlishly and petulantly, is that I could only surmise that the market for books like this consists mainly of somewhat innocent readers; of people who whose only previous conception of Christ’s atoning work is of the standard, unreconstructed, washed-in-the-blood variety. For them, discovering what Jones is writing about would come as manna in the wilderness, and in that regard Jones has performed a mitzvah by publishing this book.
What Do Islamophobes Have in Common with the Taliban?
“The Taliban and the Islamophobes have a very similar reading of Islam, and their political fates are in part dependent on this shared understanding of the religion. Those of us in the vast middle between these two extremes can take very concrete steps to end the divide between the West and Islam that exists nowhere more strongly than in the minds of these extremists. I offer three concrete recommendations at the end of Crusade 2.0.”
Read More
Fight the Power: How to Read, and Re-Read, the Book of Revelation
American Christians assume that what prophecy does is predict specific events to happen. And of course that’s the way the Book of Revelation has been read. They read it, as you say, as predicting this means this, or the beast is this. But prophesy, as we know, is a highly interpretative art, and the way this book lives and has lived for two thousand years is by interpretation and reinterpretation.
Read More
Does the Inquisition Explain the Modern World?
A new book of popular history provides an exhaustive and detailed history of the brutal yet bureaucratic Inquisition, arguing that it helps explain what the world is today.
Read More
Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church
“What the feminist movement and the LGBT movement have become for religious communities is a test of hospitality. Are you really open to accepting and welcoming everyone? Is the personhood of the gay couple as welcome as the personhood of the straight couple? It’s not just simply what your political position is about the rights of these people, but are these people really people? And are they people with their full wisdom, their full experience, their full sense of who they are? Are they really, truly welcomed into the deepest realms of making community?”
Read MoreLiving Between Worlds: Muslim, American, Five Percenter
Michael Muhammad Knight is living in that liminal space, not crossing thresholds of belonging and closing the door. He walks back and forth, and the text conveys that sense of unsettledness. Intentionally or not, Knight forces the reader to think about how we define ourselves and how much agency we actually have in that process.
Read More
Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion
The vision of justice and political progress that reigns in American culture and progressive religious circles is one of restoring the individual’s dignity, which imagines the individual—even as a member of a community—as somehow whole. This vision of wholeness, however, often has to function differentially: for my wholeness to be meaningful, then someone somewhere, if only imaginatively and fantastically, has to be understood as lacking wholeness, as needing restoration.
Read More
God or Gay, No Need to Choose Sides
“The book for me is personal as well as political. A lot of people, myself included, were raised to believe that religion and sexual minorities were incompatible—that it really is God versus Gay. Personally, I chose the ‘God’ side for ten years, repressing my sexuality and cutting myself off from other people. Even when I finally gave up, I still thought that coming out would be the end of my religious life. In fact, it was the beginning of it.”
Read MoreBarbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided Explores the Dark Side of Positive Thinking
A new book reveals the historical roots and conservative uses of the positive thinking movement, showing how it encourages victim-blaming, political complacency, and a culture-wide flight from realism.
Read More