popular culture

Google’s mindfulness guru wants to “democratize enlightenment”—not through boots-on-the-ground activism, of course, but through a proliferation of wearable gadgets and prohibitively expensive mindfulness seminars.

Prof. Zoloth’s proposal tells us everything we need to know about the malaise poisoning the study of religion.

From its Christian and colonial beginnings, America has always trafficked in the fear of black people.

Getting lost in the music and found in the sound.

The war on Christmas, it’s been well documented, is not a real thing. Though there are disputes about whether or not it’s rude to say “Merry Christmas” to the less than 10 percent of Americans who don…

Episode 2 By The Numbers: Crying Meltdowns: 4 Fights: 1 Bottles of Wine Consumed: 1 Incidents of Twerking: 1 “We’re All Broken,” the title of Episode Two of “The Sisterhood,” reminds me of a poem…

In November, while governor Jay Nixon declared the controversy in Ferguson to be a state of emergency, another racially charged protest was under way in the Netherlands. On November 15 the town of…

Chalk up the lack of religion in this post to the flurry of planning, cooking and binging demanded by the American god of Thanksgiving. To its aftermath, actually. Taking a break from the regular news…

If there were a Venn diagram showing the intersection of expertise of reality television and Catholic nuns, I would be sitting right in the middle of it. In addition to spending the past three years…

Sarah Wildman’s new book, Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (Riverhead) chronicles her quest to find the woman her grandfather left behind in Vienna when he escaped the…