7 Questions for Elizabeth Drescher
Elizabeth Drescher . . . what constitutes “religion” and the “spiritual” for most people often has little in common with what scholars study and demographers track.
“New Muslim Cool” as Teaching Tool
Kelly J. Baker In one song, they rap, “We don’t care about the Patriot Act,” and in another, they state, “bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects–it was you.”
Seven Questions for Erin A. Smith: What Would Jesus Read?
Erin A. Smith I purposely excluded sacred scriptures from the study, because I wanted to investigate the messy relay between the commercial and the transcendent.
Political Realignment in Terror-Times
Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. Assassination as a form of politics is a terrifying and recurrent aspect of American life.
Fashionable Intolerance
Kelly Baker A couple of months ago, I started watching the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix. In the premiere episode, Kimmy and the three other “mole ladies” are rescued by a SWAT team from an underground bunker.
From Sophia to Silicon: The Materiality of Information
Sylvester Johnson In my last post, I discussed Bina48, an intelligent machine engineered as part of the LifeNaut project. LifeNaut engineers have uploaded into Bina48 the memories, speech samples, and other cognitive patterns of an actual human, Bina Aspen Rothblatt.
American Secularism: Seven Questions
In our interview series, “Seven Questions,” we ask some very smart people about what inspires them and how their latest work enhances our understanding of the sacred in cultural life. For this segment, we solicited responses from Joseph O. Baker and Buster G. Smith, co-authors of American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems (New […]
Accelerating the Contradictions with the Coen Brothers
Mark Hulsether “Would that it were so simple.”
Mortality Now: Top 5 Reminders of Death for Aging Baby Boomers
Gary Laderman Memento Mori. Remember, you will die. Not a pleasant thought, yet one that has universal application because it is an unavoidable truth. The vanity of life, the nature of impermanence, the transient quality of existence. You get the point.
A Dreadful and Improbable Creature: Race, Aesthetics, and the Burdens of Greatness
Judith Weisenfeld The plot of The Birth of a Nation features two intertwined narratives: a political story that moves from national unity to division in war and back to unity, and a romance in which a couple unites despite the obstacles the war presents. The Birth of a Nation is also, of course, a story about the subjugation of people of African descent, a process director D. W. Griffith frames as carried out by honorable white men who had no choice in the face of social chaos.