Jesus Christ Movie Star: A Brief History of Religion and Cinema
By S. Brent Plate In the beginning was the Jesus film . . . The birth of cinema dates from the Lumière brother’s first public screening for a paying audience in a Paris café in December 1895. The following decade saw at least a half-dozen filmed versions of the life and passion of Jesus Christ […]
Religion is Dead; Long Live . . . the Sacred
Gary Laderman I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s the end of Religion as we know it. And I do feel fine. Bring on the “nones,” the SBNRs (Spiritual But Not Religious for those of you not up to speed), the so-called atheists, freethinkers, humanists, secularists, and the anything goes Unitarians. Religion as we thought […]
Religion, Nationalism, and “Ancestral Homelands”
By Shalom Goldman In June of 2001, George W. Bush famously claimed that he had looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy, and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” This month, after Putin’s speech on the Russian […]
Sacred Spinebusters, Transcendent Toe Holds, Part One: The Confluence of Religion and Professional Wrestling
By Dan Mathewson Professional wrestling: oh, how I love it! I love its glitz, its glamor, its over-the-top, in-your-face bluster. I love that it presents itself as a hyper-masculine testosterone-fest, and yet its wrestlers prance around in bedazzling costumes, wear more makeup than Tammy Faye, and play-act in melodramas too outlandish for even the daytime Soaps. […]
Noah: An Unrighteous Man
By Jacob L. Wright The editors of Sacred Matters appreciated my comments on the film Noah in the video above, and they asked me to set it in context for their readers. What is included in this clip is just a short section of a much longer interview. I don’t offer a review of […]
An Interview with Shaun Casey, Part Four: International Relations and Religion
When Secretary of State John Kerry launched the new Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives (OFBCI), he extolled the importance and urgency of religious studies: “In fact if I went back to college today I think I would probably major in comparative religion because that’s how integrated it is in everything we are working on, and deciding, and […]
Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Heart: Learning About the New Age from After School Cartoons
By Beth Singler “Captain Planet, he’s our hero, Gonna take pollution down to zero, He’s our powers magnified, And he’s fighting on the planet’s side.” Travel back with me now through the mists of time to when dinosaurs roamed the earth and a much younger version of me returned each day from school to […]
The Bible in Comics: Genesis
By Beth Davies-Stofka, PhD The Bible was written on scrolls, papyri, and parchment and rendered in languages ancient or dead. For some religious people, it would seem an act of disrespect, if not sacrilege, to translate its stories and lessons into pictures. Yet down the centuries, countless believers have eagerly translated the Bible into art, […]
The Link between Anti-Gay Church Teachings and the Millennial Exodus
By Daniel Cox Ask someone born after 1980 whether they know anyone who has left his or her childhood religion and the answer will likely be yes. In fact, many Millennials, adults who are between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, could probably name more than one. Roughly one-quarter (24 percent) of Millennials have abandoned […]
Muslim Men: Please Shut Up about Women!
By Amanullah De Sondy A recent Pew Research Center study indicated how “people” in various Muslim countries “prefer” Muslim women to dress. The results are varied from fully veiled dress to no veil at all. There seems to be no turning away from public interest in Muslim women and the flurry of commentaries from public […]