D. F. Sebastian The contrast between the practices of modern and archaic thanksgiving rites gives us insight into the broader imagination behind how our society is constructed.
Tag Archives: secular
A Long Strange Trip: Exploring How Yoga-Narasimha Landed on the Grateful Dead’s First Album Cover
Deepak Sarma He did suggest that I try to interview living members of the band but, alas, I am still pursuing that unreachable lead.
America’s 10 Commandments: 7 Questions for Jenna Weissman Joselit
Jenna Weissman Joselit No other country made, or continues to make, as much of them as America does.
Remembering Prince
Mark Hulsether If music or group religious rituals can change the world—and I think at times they can—then the world changed during this performance.
The Changing Nature of Sacred Spaces
Wendy Cadge Flexibility is evident in many health care organizations where religious symbols have increasingly been removed from traditional chapels and furniture put on wheels to be as versatile as possible.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Lazarus
Jill Marshall In the Gospel and Bowie’s interpretation of it, the act of coming back from the dead is dramatic and controversial.
The Ruling Class: Jeff Tweedy Singing about Jesus
Jeff Tweedy Yeah he’s back jack, smokin’ crack, find him if you wanna get found…
Jim James’ Musical Blend of the Religious, Spiritual, and Secular
Scott Muir My aim here is not to fix any “real meaning” to James’ output or speculate about his personal identity, but rather to illustrate how he presents an entangled web of meanings that his listeners may appropriate for their own religious/spiritual/secular constructions of the sacred.
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.
The Wisdom of Umberto Eco
Ed Simon If the loss of Eco is both a loss of a genuine public intellectual who saw no shame in celebrating complexities, then it is also the loss of a scholar who transcended the boring culture war debates that bifurcate all experience into the religious and the secular. He understood the undeniably sacred nature of the written word, where all interpretation must in some sense be exegetical.