On the 20th Anniversary of Waco
Why are people attracted to living charismatic leaders?
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Is Norway’s Suspected Murderer Anders Breivik a Christian Terrorist?
If Anders Behring Breivik isn’t a Christian terrorist, then the same can be said of Osama bin Laden and many other Islamist activists—whose writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture and imagined themselves as re-creating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars.
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Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars
This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or departed). And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand. Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.
Read MoreNo Such Thing as a Great 9/11 Work of Art
But 9/11 has changed the kind of art we’re interested in.
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Errol Morris’ Tabloid Sensationalizes Mormonism and ‘Cult’ Deprogramming
After treating the Vietnam War and the torture images of Abu Ghraib in his most recent films, Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris turns to a 1977 scandal involving North Carolina beauty queen Joyce McKinney in his new documentary Tabloid.
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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame
Ultimately it’s disappointing that Trey Parker and Matt Stone—two of the best satirists around—should have chosen such soft religious targets: missionaries from Utah. The finale to season 14 of South Park (the censured episode about the propriety of depicting Mohammed in a bear costume) was gutsier by far. By comparison, poking fun at clueless Mormon teenagers is a cop-out. It’s a waste of theatrical talent.
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Tree of Life, Book of Job
Structured around a family (mother, father, three children) which suffers a terrible loss, The Tree of Life is an extended midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Job, a verse of which forms the epigraph to the film and which is sermonized upon during an extended scene at a church. At once essentially Catholic and doggedly scientific in its worldview, its central family becomes an archetype, undergoing processes of childlike wonderment, Oedipal lust and rage, the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, and finally, it seems, redemption.
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Coming Out on a Christian Campus, Then and Now
People kept asking, “Why would you go to a Christian school if you’re gay?” The question is unfair. So many factors—funding, family, a deep connection to the religious culture—could place a student at Harding. While more and more students may show up their first year of college with self-awareness about sexual identity, as they do at the public university where I teach, I know it is difficult to come to terms with yourself if you grow up in fundamentalist Christian culture. Many of us come out while in college; at Harding finding ourselves in a world in which something fundamental about ourselves is a category of silence at best, more likely a category of condemnation and stigmatization.
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Evangelical Islamophobia as American as Apple Pie
According to one author there is something unique about American antipathy to Islam that differs substantially from earlier campaigns against Catholics, Jews and other religious minorities.
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Did We Drink the Kool-Aid in “Suicide Cult” Disappearance?
Religion watchers across the country followed the story, just over a week ago, of the frantic search in California for a “prayer group” that authorities feared intended to commit suicide. Was the “cult” label responsible for the hyperbolic coverage?
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