popular culture

Reflecting on Sai Baba’s life, one encounters moments of divine transformation, devotion, and public service as well as pain, death, and heinous accusations. Millions of devotees believed in and worshiped Sai Baba as a god-man, an avatar of God. Many also despised him as a charlatan, a sexual abuser, and even an accessory to murder.

If bloodthirsty undead zombie action isn’t usually your thing, you might be temped to pass on Stake Land. But like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Let the Right One In, the brilliant reworking of vampire tropes by Swedish novelist-screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, Stake Land upends many of the expectations moviegoers are likely to bring to a genre film. It also makes grimly imaginative and occasionally audacious use of some of the religious and political themes threading through contemporary American culture.

There’s a 40-year interval between Stephen Levine’s previous book of poetry and his latest—that’s quite a span. Though his books of prose have found over a million readers, this newest book flies under the radar. Why? One is the still-marginal place of poetry in American culture. For book publishers, the “poetry marketplace” (a kind of oxymoron, since poetry operates largely outside the cash nexus), is largely fueled by writing programs in academia. True, Coleman Barks’ renditions of medieval Sufi poet Rumi captivated a national audience, for a spell. But America’s own living, devotional, mystic poets find a much smaller audience, and slip through the cracks of critical discourse.

Unromantic as it may sound, the celebration of the transformative power of consumption seems to be part of the magic of the wedding day for many women. On this day I am more beautiful, elegant, and radiant than any other. On this day everything is perfect and lavish and matching. A real-life royal wedding, televised and celebrated by millions, represents and encapsulates this magic. It might be tempting for some to argue that the wedding-as-princess-pageant represents a secularization of the marriage rite. But the truth is that the celebration of consumption, the acting-out of the princess ritual, is its own expression of what has become sacred.

A recent book by an eminent Israeli has caused a sensation in Israel as it calls on Jews to move past the Holocaust, which has rendered them oblivious to the suffering of others. Though Burg is firmly rooted in the tradition of Israeli apostates, his thesis overlooks several critical phenomena.

In defending David Barton, Huckabee embraces a Reconstructionist view of history.

Scientists like roboticist Hans Moravec and inventor Ray Kurzweil advocate uploading our minds into robots or virtual reality so that we can live forever. They believe that our minds can be replicated outside of our brains if we simply copy the pattern of neuro-chemical activity taking place in our bodies. That pattern, rather than the brains in which the pattern takes shape, “is” the personality. If it can be transferred to a digital medium, it can be made immortal. Surpassingly intelligent robots—our Mind Children, according to Moravec—will populate the universe, converting physical reality into a cosmic interweb of thinking machines.

The wolves outside threaten the life of the city, but the wolves hidden among us may threaten the city even more. Red Riding Hood utilizes powerful mythic tropes in retelling the classic tale.

The idea of martyrdom hasn’t been in very good shape lately. One common usage of it—“I’ll not be made a martyr!”—refers to the prospect of somewhat tragic but mostly useless suffering, perhaps in the service of a delusional cause, religious or otherwise…

Broadway musical puts LDS literalism under scrutiny.