Category: Popular Culture
Where is God in Goodbye?
A while back I found out that my partner was a sex addict who had been leading a boozy secret life full of violence fetishes, endangerment of women, unprotected sex, compulsive pornographic email exch... Read More
Making Sense of Tragedy: Was the Earthquake a “Divine Punishment”?
Over at Religion Dispatches Levi McLaughlin, a professor of religion who specializes in East Asian traditions, writes about Tokyo’s governor Shintaro Ishihara describing the tsunami that struck... Read More
Celebrating Female Clergy
A college chaplain once candidly described the process for him, as a Protestant, as one of simultaneous celebration and mourning when he recognized that Protestantism was no longer a universal norm on... Read More
Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Tibetan Buddhist Mandala
I spent a lot of time at the Gyuto Monks’ mandala at the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia. The mandala is the traditional Tibetan Buddhist form of sandpainting, pra... Read More
Listen to Lupe, Ellison and Eboo: It’s Time to Hear From More Muslims
As I sit here contemplating Representative Peter King’s (R-NY) upcoming “Muslim radicalization” hearings, trying to discern if my stomach ache is the result of the cookies I’m... Read More
You Probably Do Not Have Narcissistic Personality Disorder
I was an undergraduate when I started hearing my classmates speak in reverent tones about Buddhism. Suddenly everyone was reading Hesse’s Siddhartha and setting their watch timers for twenty minutes... Read More
An Upset in Piperville: An Object Lesson in Loving the Theologically Ridiculous
Over the past few days, one three-word tweet has put the evangelical world into a tizzy: Farewell Rob Bell. The tweet came from John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN and ... Read More
On Hockey, Honor, and the Demonized Other
On February 2, 2011, a National Hockey League game turned ugly. Two professional ice hockey teams, the New York Islanders and the host Pittsburgh Penguins, were nearing the end of a game which the f... Read More