“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and ...
Tag: Religion
“Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall”
When US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he would be stepping down after 31 years on the nation’s highest court, public reaction was both swift ...
“The Girl I Loved Was in a Cult”
North Korean refugees, among other refugees, have been sharing their stories of high-stakes escapes. American university students, among other women, have ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
How Christianity Created Rock ’n’ Roll
In the spring of 1998, in a Seinfeld episode called “The Burning,” Elaine, sitting with Jerry and George at the diner, tells them she had just borrowed her on-again ...
Muslim Fashion Is Now Mainstream
Modest Fashion is having a moment. From London catwalks, which hosted the first branded “Modest Fashion Week” in February this year, to gyms and running ...
Purgatory Is for Real
If heaven, as the Talking Heads lyric puts it, is a place where nothing ever happens, it has nevertheless powered numerous books up American best-seller lists. In the past decade, several titles have ...
The Polyphonic Gospel
At one point in Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum the narrator speculates about how the Gospels came to be written: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet ...
Taking Sides Against God
While mostly forgotten today, Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen was widely admired by his 19th-century contemporaries and went on to inspire the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and James ...
When Secularism Fails Women
When it comes to the work of what Kati Curts recently called “categorical quickening,” Joan Wallach Scott is an exceptional midwife of the body politic ...
The Big Picture: Religion and the Republic
I still remember reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time, as a freshman in college. I was astonished! How could this French aristocrat have understood us so well, I wondered ...
The Big Picture: Jews and Trump
Exit polls conducted during the 2016 election yielded a fact about the political allegiances of American Jews that was at once totally unsurprising and potentially misleading: over 70 percent of ...
The Big Picture: Evangelical Voters
In the 2016 US presidential election over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump—more even than for Mitt Romney in 2012 or for John McCain in 2008. Candidate Hillary Clinton had her …
Atheists in the Pantheon
Atheists, infidels, unbelievers. Humanists, materialists, naturalists. There are a lot of terms for the nonreligious, and many only tell us what people don’t believe. But what do nonbelievers ...
The Spirit of Black Modernism
When predictions about the 2017 Oscars began to emerge in early 2016, many people placed bets on Nate Parker’s Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury ...
A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology ...
Losing Their Religion
Rarely do we pity the pious Victorian patriarch. Why should we sympathize with the privileged men who stoutly believed that God had placed them at the apex of a “Great Chain of Being”? One of the ...
The Heartbeat of Chattahoochee Forest: Dahlonega, GA
This piece, marking the release of Bledsoe’s new novel, A Thin Bright Line, is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Urbanites joke ...
God Walks Into a Bar
One of the stories in Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Franz Kafka triumphantly addressing a fish at a public aquarium. He has just become a vegetarian, and thus finally feels his ...
How Spiritualism Spread
It seems unlikely that any era in human history was without its fascination with death or the desire to communicate with those who have passed into it. But the 19th century was a period in which ...