popular culture

This past weekend creationist Ken Ham, best known to most for his highly publicized debate with Bill Nye, posted an odd reflection concerning alien life to his blog. The impetus for Ham’s post appears…

In 2005, world news reported on an exorcism in Tanacu, Romania, in which Irina Cornici, a 23-year-old nun, died after being gagged and bound to a cross without food for three days. In 2007, Daniel…

Last week, Raw Story featured an unusual summer travel spot— The Occult Museum of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Although skeptics have dismissed the museum as “full of off-the-shelf Halloween junk, dolls…

No, in July of 2014 we don’t face the urgent threat of an established church, but we do face an ongoing struggle with those abusing freedom of religion.

As Joe Laycock noted here on RD, another creation museum called the “Northwest Science Museum” recently opened in Boise. That’s right, the Northwest Science Museum. Guess it’s time to trademark the…

In my department’s hallway, there is a placard that asks, “What can I do with my Religious Studies degree?” I now have a compelling answer: write a devastating book like The Fault in Our Stars and…

The subject of The Wooster Group’s latest work, Early Shaker Spirituals by the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, may elicit chuckles. After all, the last time the company based shows on…

This weekend, a second attack by a knife-wielding teenage girl was attributed to the online Slender Man mythos. While the attack could be a copycat crime, the connection to Slender Man is speculative…

So we’ve always known Mad Men is not your typical view of the 1960s, but until creator Matt Weiner’s pre-mid-season-finale interview with Stephen Colbert last week, I didn’t really understand how…

This Internet is abuzz with speculation about a bizarre attempted murder in which two 12-year-old girls stabbed their classmate as an offering to “Slender Man”—a supernatural entity created for the…