Commerce, Commercialism, Commercialization: How Money Gets Spent and Talked About on Holy Land Tours
By Hillary Kaell Every year, a quarter-million Christians from the United States walk where Jesus walked, a trip they describe as a physical and imaginative return to the source of their faith…
“Looking” for Spirituality and Truth
American Gurus: Seven Questions for Arthur Versluis
What sparked the idea for writing this book? Why write it now? American Gurus was a long time in the making. I first had the ideas for some of the book when I was working on American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (1993). In particular, I wanted to look at how Platonism influenced American Transcendentalism.
Seven Questions for Suzanne Glover Lindsay
What sparked the idea for writing this book? Like many researchers, I smelled a story in the gaps and disparities within even the newest work on a great topic: nineteenth-century French sculpture. Some of its most famous examples were funerary monuments that were hailed as artistic masterpieces or as key players in France’s political history without any significant reference to their intended purpose as parts of tombs.
Religion and DragonCon
Eric Reinders Every Labor Day weekend, more than fifty thousand people gather in Atlanta to talk about, and dress up as, their favorite fantasies. Naturally, there is religion in all this. It’s mostly Christianity, although not always.
An Interview with Frans de Waal Part 3: Science & Religion
This is part 3 of our series of interviews with Frans de Waal. Check out part 1 and part 2 of our interview series. Frans de Waal is an eminent primatologist renowned not only for his many publications in scientific journals, but also for several widely read books, including Chimpanzee Politics and, more recently, The Bonobo and the Atheist. In the […]
The Power, Meaning, and Challenge of a Statement: Reflections on Steven Sotloff
By Hussein Rashid For a CNN piece, Daniel Burke asked me for some quick thoughts on the statement released by American journalist Steven Sotloff’s family, after he was murdered by ISIS. The family’s statement, along with the comments made by Barak Barfi, who delivered the statement, contain many layers of meaning. It is not just […]
Debatable Origins
By Gary Laderman The presence and awareness of religion in the United States is overwhelming. We see so many different forms and variations; it plays a role in so many areas of social life. Religion is, indeed, an inescapable fact of our lives even though we can’t agree on what the hell it is; but […]
The Weight of the Guru: A Review of Kumaré
By Anandi Leela Salinas In Sanskrit, the term guru is defined as: “important,” “valuable,” “respectable,” and “heavy,” in addition to the definition that finds more currency in 21st century America: spiritual teacher in a general “Eastern” tradition. There have been a number of recently published works analyzing the role of the transnational spiritual guru in modern […]
The Christian cross, Texan identity, and “Tex-ianity”
By Ken Chitwood Crosses come in various shapes, sizes, and colors. They are ubiquitous in homes across the United States and pepper the abodes of people throughout the world. Odds are, you have one hanging in your home whether you are religious or not. The art of the cross is a wide and diverse […]