Making ‘The Link’: AIPAC’s New Crises

As its annual policy conference kicks off this weekend, AIPAC tamps down concerns about a US-Israel rift, but still faces its worst fear in a challenge from US military commanders.

Capricology: Divine Madness

This week’s episode asks big questions about psychology and religion, and reminds us that a dog is a robot’s best friend.

Creationism and Global Warming Denial: Anti-Science’s Kissing Cousins?

Both evolutionary theory and climate change have scientific consensus, but explain that to state lawmakers seeking to ‘teach the controversy.’ In a way, it doesn’t matter to them which they criticize—their goal is a denial of the validity of science itself

Jesus Loses His Freak: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another

Mark Dery

In this fourth 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 reckons with a conflicted Christ and watches in disgust as his beloved friday night coffeehouse is subsumed by the very church it was an alternative to. 

Healed of the Sin of Religion

Lisa Webster

Sara Miles was a journalist and a chef who wandered into a San Francisco church one Sunday and got religion. We talked to her about her newest book, Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead.

Losing Old Gods, Finding Nature

Bron Taylor

Ten questions for Bron Taylor, whose latest book Dark Green Religion holds that traditional religions are gradually being replaced by more sensory forms of spirituality which promote more sensible, ecologically adaptive behaviors.

Yearning For A God We Can Live With

Benjamin Weiner

Against the ascendancy of the so-called New Atheism, two new books argue for a God who transcends “god-management systems” and whose primary claim on us is through our own spiritual longing.

Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence

Michael Jerryson

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.

Excerpt: The Christian Roots of Zionism

Shalom Goldman

20th century Jewish aspirations for a revived national home were supported by three centuries of Christian enthusiasm for the return of the Jews to "their land." 

Spotlight

Spotlight

Quote

I diagnosed the death of “the black church” deliberately to provoke a conversation about the role and place of black churches in this momentous present. My aim was to re-deploy an age-old strategy to unsettle conformity with a standard view of “the black church” as necessarily prophetic and/or progressive. That story obscures more than it illumines. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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-Anthea Butler, Jonathan L. Walton, Ronald B. Neal, William D. Hart, Josef Sorett, Edward J. Blum, and Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—Long Live the Black Church
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