Books

The High Church of Art

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If art is the new religion, then museums are the new temples; temples uniquely suited to the vagaries of spirituality in the modern age.

That is the suggestive idea explored in Marcia Brennan’s new book, Curating Consciousness. Brennan introduces us to James Johnson Sweeney…

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Where Christianity and Islam Collide

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In The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, acclaimed investigative journalist and poet Eliza Griswold treads the geographical and ideological middle ground where the world’s largest faiths meet. But as Griswold reports, many places along the…

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Using the “A” Word: Israel and Apartheid

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Sasha Polakow-Suransky reported last month in The Guardian that he had found evidence that Israel planned to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa in 1975, prompting the Israeli government to issue an official denial. Polakow-Suransky’s new book, “The Unspoken Alliance” is a history of Israel’s military alliance with apartheid South Africa.

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The Religious Lives of Soldiers

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Histories of war and the military are often written as if war were a completely areligious practice. We have occasional stories of exceptionally devout generals (or presidents) and aphorisms about atheists and foxholes, but few historians seem interested in weaving religion into narratives of American war-craft whether as a way of thinking about decisions to enter war…

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