Religion Dispatches
The history of Christianity, as atheists are fond of reminding us, is one that has been drenched in blood. Whether religious war, inquisition, or colonial violence, there’s been great evil committed in the name of God. What role has the idea of Satan played in the development of this culture?
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Take your monsters seriously. The language of metaphor and symbol is not enough to explain and explore their meaning. You may just want to be left alone with your tub of popcorn but there are layers and layers of meaning in the horror genre…and a larger historical experience the monsters we love were born from.
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In 1973, a group of Jewish gay people—mostly men—gathered in New York City and created what eventually became Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. In the decades since then, the organization has burgeoned. The congregation is also known to some—perhaps many—because of an ethnography undertaken by an Israeli anthropologist who specialized in migration, but became intrigued with the congregation when in New York. Moshe Shokeid, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, wrote A Gay Synagogue in New York, a study based on participant observation and interviews with congregants in 1989.
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Religious historian Jennifer Graber discusses her examination of Protestant prison reformers, in which she upsets common assumptions about evangelicals, and our images of kind-hearted Quakers and bloodthirsty Calvinists.
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In 1986, Judith C. Brown published a book about Renaissance Italy called Immodest Acts. It was reviewed in the New York Times, The Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle, not to mention many scholarly venues. Why? Perhaps because the subtitle of the book was The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.
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In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.
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The book is at once a rich, humorous history of comics, a political commentary on the absurdities of conservative British and American culture, and a deeply personal memoir. The relevant moments for us here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies…
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In the concluding volume of his trilogy on religion and secularism, the author argues that there is no chasm between religious belief and non-belief; certainly not in terms of politics and not even in personal terms.
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RD talks with journalist Amy Waldman whose first novel, The Submission, presciently imagines a controversy, set in post-9/11 New York City, in which the design of a Muslim-American wins a contest to build a 9/11 memorial.
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