popular culture

For all that Bloom got wrong about theory and the state of the discipline, he was correct in his contention that the sometimes godlessness of the field was a critical detriment, and that ‘A nation obsessed with religion rather desperately needs a religious criticism.’

Homophobia, misogyny, and contempt for the poor are so very much taken for granted and accepted as “Christian” within The Family that its principals are able to say, with a perfectly straight face, that they have no political agenda when they support and subsidize authoritarian leaders around the world who exemplify and implement these hatreds.

I think all of these [Christian rock stars] who find the courage to share their truth make a huge impact, and if everyone in contemporary Christian music and the church was honest about their own truth, their own questions, and their own beliefs, I think we would progress a lot quicker.

Morrison’s witness to language’s power to both destroy and create has been on ample display in our current season of American blood-letting. In 1993 Morrison warned of “Tongue-suicide,” which is “common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is … human.”

With the Church of England changing its investment policy on medical cannabis, and given Meghan and Harry’s familiarity with it, some wonder whether the Queen, if not the Royal Family in general, can become one of the best ‘cannabis brands’ in the world.

Advocates of school yoga and mindfulness are no doubt sincere when they speak of these practices as secular resources that are desperately needed by a troubled education system, but there are compelling reasons to be skeptical.

O’Reilly and Dugard’s interpretation of the gospels in Killing Jesus was motivated by the same politics of resentment that Trump inherited from the Tea Party—a politics of fiscal, ethnic/racial, and religious conservatism.

While TST is not the first Satanic organization to obtain this status, it is the first group that clearly intends to deploy this status in legal challenges. TST’s demands for equal treatment under the law are going to be much harder to dismiss from here on out.

Unless you actively follow the issues facing minority religions you probably heard little or nothing about the destruction and desecration of mosques that’s part of a larger Chinese governmental effort to expunge Islam from China.

There are certain theological implications to the black hole. Not that it confirms any literal or conventional belief in a deity. God need not be real for divinity to be an applicable concept, for it’s good enough that the black hole is real.