Girls’ Lena Dunham Does Adam and Eve
Could a real version be coming soon to a theater near you?
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Fr. John Dear, Dismissed from Jesuits: “It Is So Strange to Be Hated by So Many Church Leaders”
“If you are going to be a Catholic—or any type of Christian—you are going to have to get rid of your guns, withdraw from any military, have nothing to do with weapons manufacturing or killing, and practice nonviolence at every level.”
Read MoreAtheists Support L.A. Pastor Who Faces “Tribunal” for LGBT Advocacy
Oscar Gets Religion: 7 Categories We’d Like to See
No Bible in this year’s Oscar nominees, and not much in the way of supernatural—but plenty of religion, if you know how to look for it.
Read MoreOscar Watch: Why Spike Jonze’s Her Is Not About Technology
If the critique of our reliance on technology is the obvious takeaway from Her, the less obvious but perhaps more interesting critique seems to be of our culture’s attitude toward romantic love.
Read MoreHannibal Returns: Is TV’s Favorite Serial Killer the Devil Himself?
Hannibal has “beautiful” crime scenes, but it does not really romanticize suffering. Its version of Hannibal Lecter is a great aesthete, but the beautiful tableaux he creates are polluted, just as the elaborate dinners he prepares for his friends and acquaintances secretly involve the cooked organs of his victims.
Read MorePublisher Withdraws History of Hinduism, Amid Protest
The news has hit most of the major papers in India and the United States. Under threat from a small group called Shiksha Bachao Andolan, Penguin Press has withdrawn Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History.
Read MoreMarianne Williamson and Me
We—especially those in academia and the media—have written off religion as divisive, outmoded and irrelevant just as we have trivialized spirituality as frivolous self-indulgence. As a result, our politics are soulless and our candidates’ calls for hope fail to translate into change.
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Pete Seeger Was No Saint
Pete Seeger had mixed feelings about organized religion, but he had strong feelings about organizing. He knew the power of joining people together in song. Just don’t call him a saint.
Read MoreOn Whistleblowing, MLK, Jr., and the Politics of Resistance in the Digital Age
“We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to co-operate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.”
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