Religion Dispatches
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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The political types, both right and left, have managed to create the idea that the sixties were a time of leftist, collectivist politics. But this was actually an era of mad individualism, not collectivism, of romantic essentialism, not social construction. The old lefties failed in their every effort to organize… and a lot of old hippies are Ron Paul types today.
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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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10 questions for the author of a new satire of American Christianity.
On August 31, a few days before the opening of the current American-led Middle East peace talks in Washington, four Israelis were killed by Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Among them was a pregnant woman. This did not bode well for the future of the talks, about which there was already a great…
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Rauf writes in his 2004 book that in his post 9-11 experience, “portraying Islam and Muslims as moderate is a low priority.” He could not have known how prescient this observation would turn out to be…
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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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