Earlier this week we heard about the evangelical backgrounds of public intellectuals Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, and Christine Smallwood. Summarizing a report from Killing the Buddha, Daniel Vaca noted that all three mentioned the influence of the Bible on their habits of reading. Now avant garde jazz composer Carla Bley has acknowledged the impact of an evangelical childhood on her music.
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Chinese Christians
by Jessica PolebaumAt the Guardian, Mervyn Thomas contextualizes the recent Chinese government crackdowns on Christian worship.
December 19, 2009
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Thomas Friedman taken to task
by Charles GelmanAt the Huffington Post John O. Voll and John Esposito rebut in no uncertain terms Thomas L. Friedman's most recent New York Times op-ed, which misleadingly claimed broad Muslim support for acts of political violence.
December 21, 2009
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Hollywood’s religion of pantheism
by Nathan SchneiderIn the New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat describes the new movie Avatar as an example of pantheism, "a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world."
December 21, 2009
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Lapham’s “Religion”
by Nathan SchneiderIn his preamble to the new "Religion" issue of Lapham's Quarterly, Lewis Lapham describes the downfall of traditional religion as he experienced it.
December 21, 2009
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The Faith Instinct
by Jessica PolebaumThe Economist reviews evolutionary biologist Nicholas Wade's The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures.
December 21, 2009
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Dean of natural law
by Nathan SchneiderIn the New York Times Magazine, David Kirkpatrick writes about Robert P. George, one of the architects of the recently-unveiled Manhattan Declaration and a legal scholar who is emerging as a leading voice among Christian conservatives. He is also an outspoken proponent of natural-law reasoning.
December 22, 2009
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Religious restrictions by the numbers
by Daniel VacaThe Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released a new study of "Global Restrictions on Religion." Pew casts the report as the first "quantitative study that reviews an extensive number of sources to measure how governments and private actors infringe on religious beliefs and practices around the world." Its methodology, however, deserves scrutiny.
December 22, 2009
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Dialectic of Enlightenment, today and tomorrow
by Charles GelmanLooking back at Roger Forster's 2001 Telos essay "Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique," Andrew Walker advocates for the "continued relevance" of Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal text.
December 22, 2009
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Anti-Semitism in Lake Wobegon
by John SchmalzbauerFor thirty-five years, Garrison Keillor has brought listeners into the village of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, the “town that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve.” An idealized setting for Keillor’s storytelling, it has, until recently, been innocent of overt prejudice. Last Wednesday, Keillor ruined all that in an anti-Semitic column, “Nonbelievers, please leave Christmas alone.”
December 22, 2009