Bonnaroo Spirituality and Collective Effervescence
Scott Muir Bonnaroovians overwhelmingly endorse the notion that the festival is a sacred collective experience.
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.”
7 Questions for Matthew Avery Sutton
Matthew Avery Sutton I was not terribly interested in defining religion or the sacred. My focus was on how what my subjects would define as their religious beliefs and convictions functioned. I focused on the work that their religion did.
Candomblé Reconsidered: A Sacred Matters Interview
Dianne Stewart In the twenty-first century, increasing populations are becoming aware of the presence of African-heritage religions in the diaspora but we have still much to learn from and about these religions.
Cutting up “The Birth of a Nation”
S. Brent Plate Cut up D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and it bleeds a little. Rearrange the pieces, as Griffith so expertly cut up film sequences, and put them together in new ways. Splice it into histories, the stories of photography, race, literature, the KKK, bodies, film technique, and it comes out looking different. But it’s gonna bleed. The following articles, are such cuts, such incisive interventions.