Religion Dispatches
What does it mean that the World War II Memorial in DC drowns conversation in the roar of its fountains? A new book explains what our monuments reveal about the intertwining of sacred and patriotic in American civic culture.
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Author Stephen Mansfield is getting hate mail. Why does the religious right think that this ex-pastor will roast in hell?
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“Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence” in Wastelands, a new anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction.
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A new book by four leading intellectuals (Talal Asad, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Wendy Brown) brings attention to the ongoing failures of the Euro-American liberal legal order in the face of the conflict between religious and secular values—and in doing so puts those very categories into question.
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The co-editor of a new book on the history of Buddhist violence and warfare explains how the notion of a purely mystical and otherworldly Buddhism—promoted by some of the great interpreters of the tradition—denies its adherents’ humanity.
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Mark C. Taylor discusses how trends in today’s world are not “outside” religion, but are part of the history of religious thought.
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The president’s speeches at West Point and in Oslo show that there’s more than one way to be a wartime president.
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The reactions to the English-language publication of a book deemed “a scandal” reveal as much about the politics of contemporary Israel (and of its relation to the American Jewish community) as they do about the history the book describes. It’s not that Shlomo Sand believes that the Jews are not the chosen people—he argues that they might not be a people at all.
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In this excerpt from Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism), the son of influential evangelicals asks whether anyone who remains a “professional Christian” in the evangelical/fundamentalist world risks becoming an atheist and/or a liar.
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If China becomes a new priority, an economic beacon and a political patron, what happens to the question of reconciling Islam and the West? Two new books offer groundbreaking approaches to this and other unexpected questions.
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