“Taking aim” at both the Religious Right and the New Atheists, a new book aims to make progressive politics safe for the religious, and religion safe for progressive politics.
The other day, Terry Sanderson—president of the United Kingdom’s National Secular Society—published a short, scathing indictment of theology in The Guardian, a piece titled “
To turn suddenly to sisters as the rescue workers for a male-led institution is to saddle them with a clean-up operation that would “naturally” be a woman’s job in patriarchy.
A new book by an iconic rapper, the Wu Tang Clan’s RZA, told in the voice of a street sage, tells the story of his ascent from the mean streets of Brooklyn to the pinnacle of success, and shows him to be the quintessential postmodern American spiritual seeker.
Mormonism, a movement that began with an outdoorsy prophet who led the Latter-day Saints to a unique Center Place in North America is now managed by a global corporation that manufactures generic, fungible, sacred space with plush carpeting and upholstery. That seems about as American as it gets.
Marquette may be in the vanguard of Catholic institutions that are growing increasingly parochial, shaping the social sciences and perhaps eventually the physical sciences to Roman kyriarchal ideology rather than to the gold standard in the field. It is a sad loss of what might have become a world-class university.
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.
