Euthanasia Billboards, Post-Rapture Pet Care, Can You Tell a Burqa from a Hijab?
The week in religion, poetically.
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Free Yiddish Lessons, Vacation Liberty School, and Brangelina’s Universalism: The Week in Religion, Poetically
The week’s religion news.
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“My Prayer Flies Like a Word on a Wing”: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 5
In this fifth installment of Mark Dery’s cultural critique-cum-“nonfiction novella” about a born-again teen’s transcendent encounter with Ziggy Stardust in the 1970s, our hero Accepts Bowie as His Personal Savior. Delving deep into Bowie’s religious cosmology, we encounter Tibetan Buddhism, Nietzchean existentialism, Crowleyite magick, dimestore occultism, Kabbalistic mysticism, and — mirabile dictu! — Christianity.
Read MoreHollywood Agents of God: Are Movies the Sacred Texts of our Time?
As the ‘gods’ of Hollywood descend in designer digs, religion scholars Gary Laderman and Anthea Butler discuss the divinity of celebrity in America.
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Yearning For A God We Can Live With
Two new books, one offering a vision of interfaith, universal religion, the other a model of a radically transformed Judaism, attempt to wrestle God into the everyday. Against the ascendancy of the so-called New Atheism, both writers argue for a God who transcends “god-management systems” and whose primary claim on us is through our own spiritual longing.
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Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence
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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Unforgiven: Brit and Tiger and the Problem of Speed-Cycle Grace
Tiger could take Brit Hume’s suggestion and get Jesus for his troubles but nobody should pretend that anything Christian is going on here.
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No Buddhists in Washington?
Buddhism, which has a larger US population than either Islam or Hinduism, has had a sizable and growing impact on American culture. So why no representative on the Obama administration’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships?
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Claude Lévi-Strauss: Meeting the Myth
The latest generation of religion scholars has studied Lévi-Strauss only to distance itself from his theories, and to challenge the myth of structuralism. Perhaps in doing so we have created a fable of our own.
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House Health Care Bill Discriminates Against Religious Freedom
Abortion is not a liberal, secular invention; there are examples in Jewish, Muslim, and even Christian theologies—and in Buddhist and Hindu traditions—of instances in which abortion is justified.
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