new age spiritualities

Ridiculously expensive to make and plagued by production disasters.

We—especially those in academia and the media—have written off religion as divisive, outmoded and irrelevant just as we have trivialized spirituality as frivolous self-indulgence. As a result, our politics are soulless and our candidates’ calls for hope fail to translate into change.

The surge of enthusiasm about State’s new agenda has too often carried with it the assumption that when the US government decides to engage religion abroad, religious Americans are best equipped to teach us how to do the work.

From India to China to Africa, events this month leave no doubt that the struggle for LGBT rights has gone global.

The neurophilosopher, whose latest book argues that the brain is all we are, discusses yoga, her awkward talk with the Dalai Lama, the soul and what makes her want to tell someone to just “bugger off!”

If traditional notions of Judaism and Jewishness are at odds with the contemporary world, one can either change Judaism, or one can change the world. A new book makes a case for the former.

The far left and the far right agree on many things: mainstream politics doesn’t matter, hidden forces control our destiny, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, the world is about to end.

’Tis the season to be jolly? Well, not if you attended the annual AAR-SBL national meeting in Chicago’s McCormick Place. If the experience of others was like mine, those of us with some years on the scene came away deeply dissatisfied.

It’s simpler to assume that religion and feminism are at odds; that religion is simply the provenance of those who use tools like pro-life politics to fight feminist agendas. It’s much more complicated to think of religion as both resource and adversary in the political struggles that feminists face.

For evangelicals like Steve Matthews, Burning Man embodies deep-seated fears which can also be seen playing out in other aspects of American culture. Many conservatives fear that America is undergoing decay, and this is taking place in the spiritual realm as well. A lingering economic malaise, coupled with our continued cultural fascination with apocalyptic scenarios, provides a context in which Burning Man functions as a Rorschach test.