Religion Dispatches
The world of Sarah Palin can be divided neatly into good and bad. The latter category includes Hollywood, John Kerry, Michael Moore, “left-wing professors and journalists,” Nancy Pelosi, the Ninth Circuit Court, liberals, MSNBC, the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times, Barack Obama, health care, and “all the lawyers and academics and schooled-up ‘experts’ in D.C.”
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On numerous occasions Pope Benedict has ignored the connection between Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism, and when posed a question about German responsibility for the Holocaust he fails to address it directly.
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One of our premier interviewers, host of KQED’s Forum, talks to RD Senior Editor Lisa Webster about atheists, God, his parents’ Judaism, and writing a book without answers.
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According to one author there is something unique about American antipathy to Islam that differs substantially from earlier campaigns against Catholics, Jews and other religious minorities.
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There’s a scene in Martin Preib’s recent and remarkable collection of essays where he describes pulling over to the side of the road to scribble down a note, deep in conversation about the work of Walt Whitman, about what that work accomplished and how. “My terms are useless:…
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The ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything.
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Humanity may be a mystery, but what about the human who virtually enters a spec of dust and is able to learn the mysteries of dustness? Doesn’t this kind of leap require us to adopt a kind of awe and reverence for the mysteries outside the human as well?
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I’d always considered myself a rationalist, but over the next twelve months a series of odd events would challenge the way I viewed the world. Many people suggested I write a book about my experiences, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that for the simple reason that if you tell someone, especially a stranger, that you might have a ghost in your house, the probability of that person thinking you’re crazy is rather high.
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Sam Harris latest, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is undermined by poor scholarship, ad hominem attacks and an obsession with religion.
There is nothing small-bore or contemptible about a novel that explores the wonder and heartbreak of romantic love against the distant thunder of imperial warfare.
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