popular culture

Travel imparts one with the indelible impression that something is out there. That something may not be the existence of God, but it is certainly the existence of the rest of the world. Plus, it’s harder to kill those you’ve met.

By the time this book tour is finished, she will have succeeded in splitting the republican party, solidifying a new hard right religious base, and making enough money to turn Alaska into the New Jerusalem.

Maybe it’s time to stop framing European conquest as dinner party between Pilgrims and Indians.

A new book.

Hell to the Naw!

Claude Lévi-Strauss, visionary anthropologist, once said: “The world began without man and will end without him.” Was he post-humanist? Post-monotheist? Such binaries can’t capture a thinker of his subtlety.

The latest generation of religion scholars has studied Lévi-Strauss only to distance itself from his theories, and to challenge the myth of structuralism. Perhaps in doing so we have created a fable of our own.

With his signature combination of controversy-avoidance and biblical cherry-picking Joel Osteen promotes the good life.

A letter to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg from a scholar of religious extremism.

A four-hour documentary on what it means to be Latino/a in America misses the mark completely.