Category: Posts
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Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Last night, Dr. Atomic closed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and I saw it from standing room. I have already written about a slow opera with big hopes, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha—this is another. What is it about these new operas, which have to turn every historical event into a funeral march? In John Adams’s presentation…
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Ways of Using Science
The most promising approach in the study of the relationship between “science and religion” today is not to talk about them at all. Neither the warfare model—where the two domains are utterly at odds—nor harmony one—that they are mutually supportive—quite captures the historical and epistemological evidence. Stephen J. Gould’s vision of “non-overlapping magesteria” is a…
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Obama’s Harlem
After giving up on the excruciating computer graphics and talking heads of MSNBC’s election coverage, my friends and I got on the train and headed up to Harlem. We arrived at 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard not a minute before Barack Obama was declared winner. The enormous crowd, pouring into the streets far…
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The Election at RD
Religion Dispatches asked a bunch of its writers to come up with a short blurb on the election. They put it up today. And in turns out that, of eight blurbs, three of us (myself included) wrote about Colin Powell’s remarkable words of support for Obama. Take a look. My blurb starts like this: A…
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Reasons in Practice
Sunday morning at the AAR (okay, maybe I am live-blogging) I went not to church (unless you count the moment of prayer at the panel on Zizek by the Christian Theological Research Fellowship) but to a comparative ethics panel about John Kelsay’s recent book, Arguing the Just War in Islam. The panelists discussed the book…
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All in Moderation?
I could be frantically live-blogging from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago. I won’t, per se. But in a number of places here I have been hearing lots of talk about religious “extremists” and “moderates.” It goes without saying that nearly all of the thousands of AAR attendees—mostly academics in religious studies…
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Agnostic Machinery
Just released today is the first of what will hopefully be a series of articles of mine about science and religion on Seed magazine’s online edition. “Agnostic machinery,” it’s called. The idea is this: I went and saw the Bill Maher New Atheist movie Religulous (aided by trusty friend Jake), noticed that the religion biologizers…
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Where Went the Ancient Astronauts?
The Smart Set, an excellent web magazine of ideas and things, has just published an article of mine on “ancient astronaut” theory—the idea that all the gods that the ancients believed in were actually extraterrestrials with advanced technology. Ancient astronauts are an old hobby of mine, a delightful mix between my interests in religion and…