popular culture

The New Atheists, armed with swords and cudgels, are still doing old-fashioned battle with religion; but they haven’t noticed that the skirmish may have passed them by. Are religion and science poised for a truce?

Forget what you learned about myth from Joseph Campbell—this death panel rumor is the real deal: values masquerading as truth, all in service of one heckuva group fantasy.

While the rioting over the Danish cartoons seems to be well behind us, Yale University Press recently removed the images from a new scholarly work on the topic. Do Muslim extremists need a scholarly book as pretext with two wars being fought in Muslim nations and an ongoing crisis in Gaza? The problem isn’t with these images, but with the ubiquitous Islamophobia in the United States.

As the media yawns at the latest unemployment numbers, our columnist seeks religious leadership on the taboo subject of our dysfunctional relationship to work. For even if the economy recovers and “full employment” returns, we will still be encountering a workplace that remains a site of utter terror in some instances and a site of routine abuse and low-grade anxiety in others.

A recent story in the New Yorker on the execution of an innocent man seldom mentions religion, though the elements are all there.

A religious scholar in Egypt recently warned against listening to broadcasts of the Qur’an, as the mediating influence is disrespectful to the text. But what of disregard for human agency?

Is Obama pulling a Dukakis, allowing all that anger and anxiety that could’ve been used for good to just slip away?

Nothing like dropping in a lot of trigger-happy hired guns to win hearts and minds, right?

Conservative Gary Bauer’s recent attempt to justify American torture of prisoners using Just War Theory is found wanting.

Ruth Madoff, the disgraced financier’s wife, loved the theater, and a particularly lavish version of the American Dream. But her sleep, and ours, is not so easy now.