Religion Dispatches
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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Can a genetically altered hot dog be kosher? Can a vegetarian eat a tomato that has animal DNA in it? Is modified corn just another instance of colonialism? These and other questions are broached in a new anthology, sure to make excellent Thanksgiving dinner conversation.
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Author Bruce Feiler is back from “walking the Bible” and is roaming the country, tracing Moses’ footsteps. But in his eagerness to make the prophet into a unifying symbol, he misses the true complexity of the relationship between religion and the secular in America.
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Among the most surprising things about underground comics master R. Crumb’s new illustration of the first book of the Hebrew Bible is not only how straight he plays the visual translation, but also the affinity between his own sensibility and the fleshly materiality of Genesis.
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Why is the character of Jesus so powerful? Why is he such a hit? Bestselling writer Mary Gordon re-reads the Gospels, asking these questions, among others, and trying to figure out why fundamentalist readings of scripture, grounded in fear and rage, have come to dominate the understanding of religion in this country.
Read MoreBruce Lawrence’s unflattering review of Ariel Glucklich’s new book on suicide bombers elicited a spirited response from the author.
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The author of a new book talks to RD about the radical that lies beneath our everyday practices, whether ethics requires religion, and the “education of desire.”
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Abby Sher collected thumbtacks and paper clips, traced the patterns on her wallpaper, and prayed fervidly to avert disaster. In another era she might have been just another pious eccentric; today she’s a recovering obsessive-compulsive who has renounced (most of) her faith.
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An online novel about a flu pandemic blurs the boundaries between real “flu-blogging” and the dystopic world of its blogger protagonist. And it exposes the cultural anxiety, both religious and secular, that disease unleashes.
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