How Much is a Google?
The company’s threat to pull out of China over censorship has implications for religion.
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Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality
Avatar is now officially the top-grossing movie of all time, but that’s not because it shows us something entirely original (in 3D no less). Like all good myths, it is a mashup: a mix of well-tested stories, presented in an unfamiliar way.
Read MoreFocusing on the Tebow Family
“Pro-life” Super Bowl ad sparks controversy about network advertising policies.
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No Garden to Get Back to: Understanding Post-Avatar Ecological Depressive Disorder
It may be only a movie, but it is turning significant segments of its audience into eco-radicals. We can go ahead and dissect the film’s weaknesses, but as our planet dies, and politicians fail, is this really how we want to talk about the most influential ecological parable of our time?
Read MoreCaprica’s Advertising and Teen Religion
How a television show can be a religious event.
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Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired
The Vatican’s Web site considers a patron saint of the internet, Muslims debate divorce by text, and Jews pray by email; How does the inevitable transition to the virtual realm affect religious experience across the world?
Read MoreVampires, Communion, Redemption
The Christian symbolism in Daybreakers.
Read MoreTravolta Airlifts Scientology, Supplies, to Haiti
Representatives of Scientology have had trouble with prosyletizing in the past.
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Proselytizing the Pros: Christianity in Big-Time Sports
Mark McGwire gives thanks to “the man upstairs” as he confesses his steroid use, Tiger Woods is publicly urged to find Jesus—but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, or the football, as the case may be, when it comes to the link between sports and evangelical Christianity.
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‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance
As people around the world begin to reckon with the scope of the catastrophe in Haiti, we offer a set of responses to what was—for those whose work focuses on American religion—a shameful expression of prejudice and ignorance from a once-prominent evangelical leader.
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