popular culture

British comedy writer and celebrity journalist Jane Bussmann had a revelation while interviewing actor Ashton Kutcher at a Hollywood café: She really had to find something more meaningful to do. So she embarked on a Google quest for the most evil man in the world and found Joseph…

While President Obama, in his much-debated Oval Office Address last week, seemed to be calling Americans to personal prayer, activist Drew Landry’s vision is more collective, and possibly more practical. He believes the simple discipline of praying in unison will get people to pay more attention to the disaster being laid out at their doorsteps. Meanwhile, experts like Len Bahr say it is too late to restore the Gulf. The problem in dealing with the environmental disaster, he says, whether by prayer or science, is that nobody knows how bad it will get before it can get better.

The Hungry Earth.

The services I attended at Philadelphia’s Congregation Temple Bethel were loud and joyous, but I felt totally out of place. That was a familiar feeling, of course. My two Jewish parents raised me without any religious education. (My father, a butcher, takes an almost perverse delight in flouting his non-belief with gestures like giving me lard as a Christmas present.) But I was more at ease this morning, because it was not expected that I understand the rituals because I look like a Jew. I was one of the only white people in shul that morning, and it was nice to look as out of place as I usually feel.

In the latest episode, the Hungry Earth, ill-advised human drilling has consequences.

The popular term “spiritual but not religious” only goes so far in describing an event like this. I think Burning Man shows us the enduring importance of ritual as a vehicle through which humans connect with one another and as well as with a mysterious “more,” while also showing us how these expressions are increasingly displaced outside the bounds of the dominant Western cultural concepts of “religion.”

Episode 7: “Amy’s Choice”

Two of Galileo’s fingers (three, actually) are to be placed on public display, along with one of his teeth, in the newly refurbished Museum of the History of Science in Florence.

The student of theology revels in the grandeur, emotion and beauty of a clear moment of human interconnectedness. It is the student of ethics, however, that lets her eyes wander further beyond the pitch. With that drift the existential beauty becomes more complicated; potentially tragic.

Many first learned of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints when the polygamous group came into the media spotlight following leader Warren Jeffs’ arrest (and eventual conviction) as an accomplice to rape. Pictures of young women in “prairie dresses” were splashed on TV and the media rushed to try to explain who these people actually were. Were they Mormons? Were they a cult? Sons of Perdition, a documentary that premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, follows the story of a group of teenage boys who have left the FLDS church, and tracks their struggles in exile from their homes and families.