Religion Dispatches
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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It was pouring rain, cold rain, on an early March morning, as I headed to Brooklyn Label, a café near my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I was meeting Vito Aiuto, pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, a plant of Redeemer Presbyterian, one of the largest and most…
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Much of Steve Fuller’s new book is just a strong way of saying what is entirely uncontroversial among historians of science, even if easily forgotten by most everyone else.
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The fact that I live in a neighborhood and a nation where each person’s right to celebrate Independence Day as noisily as possible is held sacred gives special piquancy to reflecting on a book about noise on such a day—right under the rocket’s red glare, as it were.
…
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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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