Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso
The Raelians, who regard the Catholic Church as their sexually repressive nemesis, say they’ve launched Clitoraid to help the victims of female circumcision.
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Episcopal Church Removes Bishop Who Split Following LGBT Inclusion Vote
Still wrangling over the property.
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Apocalypse Now and Then: Our Global Death Wish
What ought we do about millennial thinking in our day? If the combined 1300 pages of these two books have taught me anything, it’s that we can’t make it just go away. There is something fascinating, and perverse, in the human psyche that seems to yearn for this world to be other than how it is, even if that means destroying it.
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The Pope, The Chef & Krampus: Merry Yikesmas!
What do Pope Benedict XVI and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain have in common? They both have a thing for Krampus.
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In Praise of Mary Magdalene
Mary Magdalene has been the object of endless projection, one fantasy after another luridly tattooed on the screen of her flesh. That some of these projections are in fact feminist projections only confirms her status as a saint for our times. Mary of Magdala is Mary of Irony, too.
Religious Belief Or Mental Illness?
The paranoid few who seem genuinely disturbed by the possibility of the coming end of the world may be responding the most reasonably to current events. Or not. This ambiguity is at the heart of Jeff Nichols’ recent film Take Shelter. The film explores whether its protagonist is crazy, or a prophet, or both.
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Secular End Times & Apocalyptic ‘Roosters’
In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.
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Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City
If there is any communal rite of passage at Burning Man, it is the Temple Burn on Sunday night, the event’s finale. Not everyone comes out for this event; some would rather dance to techno music or chat up a neighbor on the next bar stool instead of joining tens of thousands of Burners sitting on the ground quietly waiting for the temple to burn down, taking all their messages and their pain—they hope—with it.
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How We Got to Super: Grant Morrison’s Visionary Gnosticism
The book is at once a rich, humorous history of comics, a political commentary on the absurdities of conservative British and American culture, and a deeply personal memoir. The relevant moments for us here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies…
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Can a Pig Heart be Kosher?
What happens when a breakthrough in technology leaves religious scholars without much to go on?
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