Jesus Died For This?
10 questions for the author of a new satire of American Christianity.
Books
Opening the Door to Hell: Jewish Terrorism in Israel
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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An American and a Muslim: Reading Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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Where Christianity and Islam Collide
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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Cooler than Thou: Will Hipsters Wreck Christianity?
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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Better Science Through God?
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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Noise in the Hood: Raising the Volume and Losing Our Bodies
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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Using the “A” Word: Israel and Apartheid
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
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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Religious Differences Are Real (and Tolerance Can Be an Empty Virtue)
One perspective that new atheists and liberal multiculturalists share is that the religions are essentially the same (false and poisonous on the one hand, and true and beautiful on the other). I think this view is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue.
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