Posts Tagged ‘religion’
New Names for Old Gods
June 28, 2017
The philosopher William James was one of the turn of the century’s greatest examiners of the religious experience, noting its varieties and studying its phenomena, albeit with the kind of distanced, unheated air characteristic of an academician of that era. But the psychologist Carl Jung was the thinker who intellectually legitimized the religious impulse as…
Read MoreTweeting My Theology
May 16, 2017
When I went to seminary, there was concern. Friends whispered. Had I gone rogue? Or worse: been “saved”? Would I suddenly start dropping things like washed in the blood into regular conversation? Admittedly, the calling to serve the church was sudden and powerful, like lightning. I had always considered myself a Christian, even if I…
Read MoreSinging the Qur’an in Different Voices
May 4, 2017
I sat through the meeting distracted, nervous. I should have been at ease. After all, I was with friends—members of a Christian-Muslim interfaith group, people I’d worked with for many years, people I trusted. But I was coming down with an acute case of performance anxiety. I had asked Ismet Akcin, the Islamic Center of…
Read MorePassover and Government Presence
May 1, 2017
“In what ways do you experience the presence of government—city, county, state, federal—in your life, your daily life, your professional life?” That’s how we began, with that question. Asking questions, that’s the practice, isn’t it, that leads to liberation? And that’s why we were there that night, wasn’t it, to recount an experience of liberation…
Read MoreWhen Art Disrupts Religion: An Interview with Philip Salim Francis
April 25, 2017
Just released by Oxford University Press, When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind has received praise from such leading scholars as David Morgan and Randall Balmer. Image editor Gregory Wolfe recently interviewed the author, Philip Salim Francis. Image: Your book has the provocative title When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the…
Read MoreAnne Fontaine’s The Innocents
February 15, 2017
After World War II devastated eastern Europe, the Red Army pushed into the countries allotted to them as spoils, such as Poland. There, they continued the destructive work that the Nazis had begun. Among those hardest hit were the women religious of Warsaw. French Red Cross physician Madeleine Pauliac, sent to find and repatriate the…
Read MoreKnee Walk
June 21, 2016
We stumbled onto the bus in Lisbon, sleepy after the overnight flight from New York. The pilgrimage tour guide handed out rosaries while the priest told the bus driver to play a recording of the rosary prayers on the sound system. I fingered the pink beads, following along with the Hail Marys and Our Fathers.…
Read MoreThe Cave of My Imagination
April 25, 2016
Ma’arat Ha-machpelah, the alliterative name sounded as magical to me as the lives of the people buried there: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. I learned about the so-called Cave of the Patriarchs, Judaism’s most ancient site, in Hebrew day school, and I still remembered the Hebrew name when I went to…
Read MoreA Strange Season for Inter-Christian Families
April 11, 2016
American culture, at this late and plural hour, seems to have pretty well normalized the notion of the interfaith family, to the extent that if your environs are urban and/or coastal, and your circles revolve around the ranks of top- and second-tier universities, then the multiple-faith union is almost a given, and certainly not a…
Read MoreA Rabbi, a Priest, and a Wedding: Part 2
March 31, 2016
Read Part 1 here. Judaism tells us how to leave. Leaving the Sabbath. Leaving Israel. Leaving a marriage. Leaving life. We have rituals and words of prayer and entire theologies and words of wisdom about departure. Sometimes we leave with candles and sweet smells. Other times we depart with a divine request for safety as…
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