Tag: utopia
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An Eden Full of Dudes
The end is the beginning is the end (that’s a Smashing Pumpkins line), and all are in Eden. Today at Religion Dispatches, Brook Wilensky-Lanford and I talk about her brand new book, Paradise Lust, out this week. It tells the stories of some bold explorers from the past few centuries who have tried to figure…
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Reverend Billy, the “Fake Leader”
Especially when it comes to religion, the line between reality and performance can be very hard to draw. No one reveals this more than Reverend Billy, a New York-based performance artist who uses a televangelist act to preach against the evils of consumerism. In the city election next Tuesday, Billy—using his “real” name, William Talen—will…
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Sentimental Repression
It has been a welcome relief from the busy romantic adventures of a single fellow in his mid-twenties in New York City, with my cellular phone by happenstance out of commission, to indulge in a reverie of reflection. Its occasion—in addition to the missing phone—was the discovery of Mark Greif’s challenging new essay at n+1…
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Spiritual Machines
Today at The Immanent Frame, I’ve got an interview with John Lardas Modern, one of the most exciting young scholars of religion out there today: I’ve always been taken with gadgetry in a lot of ways, but at the same time I’m also afraid of my television set. My academic interest in technology stems from…
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Religion for Radicals
Today at The Immanent Frame, I talk with literary critic Terry Eagleton about his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Arguments about God and religion, he insists, are more than just tiffs about lofty ideas; they are deeply political and should be understood as such. Dawkins and I were recently…
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Star Trek Sans Politics
I’ve got a new essay on Religion Dispatches that I did up in a sleepless tizzy after seeing the new Star Trek movie. I had a great time going with my old Star Trek convention buddy Mat to the Lincoln Center IMAX on opening week. Nothing can quite compete with the thrill of seeing those…
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Revolution by Religion
I’ve got a new review in The American Prospect of two books published by Yale University Press on the same day last month, both rejoinders to the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc.): Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution and David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. Only Nixon could go to China, so perhaps it…
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The Examined Life Is Good
Sometimes I wish I were somewhere else. Who doesn’t? On a beach, maybe (done that). Or at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Obama says the action is now. But on some days, my goodness, New York is pretty hard to beat. Tonight at the glorious Brooklyn Academy of Music, I got to see…
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Environmentalism as a Politics of Fear
My friend Bryan and I have been engaged in a discussion for several weeks now about the politics of environmentalism and the prospect of climate change. We are both of a rather ascetic bent, at heart—the sense that the only way forward for the human community is a simpler existence made of nonviolence, plant-eating, and…
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Can Islam Save the Economy?
Today Religion Dispatches published an article that came out of my travels in the Middle East last fall. It’s about the financial and philosophical subculture of Islamic economics—the attempt to create an economic system consistent with religious law. This stuff has attracted a lot of attention lately because the very financial instruments that triggered the…