Culture

Books, Culture

Secret Sequel: New Age “Mind Cure” Misses the Point

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The ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything.

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Christian Nationalism, Culture

Why All the Silly Devil Talk Should be Taken Seriously

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Conspiracy theories ebb and flow in waves associated with how confident people feel about their social environments. When times are hard and unemployment rates are high, individuals get creative in where they look for explanations. It is no accident that talented, powerful, popular, and rich African American male rappers, along with female artists, are being targeted by these claims.

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Culture

Whose God in America?

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I must admit, I was pretty excited when I heard about God in America. My husband and I are big PBS fans. As the show proceeded, however, I became increasingly annoyed. We moved from the Franciscans to the Puritans, with John Winthrop ostensibly treating Anne Hutchinson as badly as the Franciscans had the Pueblos. But it seems there were no indigenous people at all in New England in those days—or else they and the Puritans got on extremely well.

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Culture

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

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Some professional historians and scholars of American religion have criticized PBS’ God doc. This is not a surprise. After all, when has the academic community ever been comfortable watching its territory invaded by an army of people lacking PhDs? On blogs, religion and history listserves, and chat rooms around the country, academics have labeled the series “oversimplified,” “truly bizarre,” “simplistic,” “intolerable,” “uneventful,” “underwhelming.” Essentially they are calling the series not enough of an “intellectual endeavor.”

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