Search

The Enlightenment was not, as is often assumed, exclusively secular. In fact, religious Protestants, Jews and Catholics played a key role in imagining a tolerant, but believing, society.

American Christians assume that what prophecy does is predict specific events to happen. And of course that’s the way the Book of Revelation has been read. They read it, as you say, as predicting this means this, or the beast is this. But prophesy, as we know, is a highly interpretative art, and the way this book lives and has lived for two thousand years is by interpretation and reinterpretation.

Relieved that Guantanamo Bay is closing? Don’t rest easy. Until we accept our collective responsibility for torture, and the fact that it requires not just the torturer’s denial, but ours, it will prevail.

RD columnist S. Brent Plate crosses disciplinary boundaries to show us how film creates worlds, just as religion does; through incantation or special effects anything is possible.

Was Du Bois, leading African American intellectual and civil rights activist, an atheist?

His first book, The Taqwacores, was xeroxed and spiral-bound, but it struck a loud punk-inflected chord in a community of mostly-Islamic youth, trying to reconcile music and religion.

Americans are the inheritors of a religious tradition that holds that inner goodness is reflected in outer beauty—but the pursuit of bodily perfection is an endeavor, both personal and commercial, that has global reach. Whether someone is looking for a better nose, or for immortality, the quest has everything to do with religion.

In the eighth and final installation of Mark Dery’s “critical novella” about a ’70s Jesus Freak who switches saviors (from J.C. to Ziggy), the author connects the dots between his devout Bowiephilia and what theologians call kenosis—the emptying out of the self to make room for the indwelling spirit of god.

Plus: Anti-abortion groups march on; Tony Perkins’ advice to Obama; Focus on the Family sets Newsweek straight; CPAC rides again; a boom in Christian films; and Training against the death penalty.

In many of the nation’s poorest states, church-backed tax activists are struggling against conservative tax policy embraced by the Christian Right.