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On any given day, Christianity is invoked to justify pacifism, violent uprising, both opposition and support for government health care, even support and opposition to genres of music. Do we have to reevaluate our conceptions of ‘what Christians believe’ in the same way we’ve had to do it for Hindus, Native Americans, and others?

“We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to co-operate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.”

In this fourth installment of Mark Dery’s cultural critique-cum-“nonfiction novella” about a born-again teen’s transcendent encounter with Ziggy Stardust in the 1970s, our hero reckons with a conflicted Christ and watches in disgust as his beloved friday night coffee house is subsumed by the very church it served as an alternative to.

When Pope Benedict refers to the ever-growing scandal threatening the Church as “petty gossip of dominant opinion” he shows, for all his theological learning, a shocking disregard for both his flock and for the moral standing of the institution he heads. Is it curtains for the Church as we know it?

David Sloan Wilson is a biologist who claims that the so-called “selfish” gene is a myth. What if we have evolved to do what’s best not for ourselves, but for the groups we live in? The implications for religion, the ultimate social organism, are huge.

Has the incivility and outright hostility finally wound down, or is it just getting started?

Is it the inhumanity of the machines that will prove to be the tragic pivot in this science fiction world, or will it the inhumanity of the humans? Again we find ourselves asking: where does human consciousness begin?

The first decade of the twenty-first century seems to have upended the Jewish world. What does it mean that conservatives, and some Orthodox, have begun to agitate for social justice, while progressives, traditionally secular, are “taking back the texts”?

Lost in (and sullied by) the sexual scandals is the Church’s investigation into an apparition of Mary.

At the same time as we learn of a new depth to the pedophilia crisis in the Church, we hear from a Vatican official that Pope Paul II had a regular practice of flagellation: chastising the body for the sake of the soul. What can we learn from this irony?