Category: Posts
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#AmericanAutumn
Over at Waging Nonviolence, I’ve been doing a bunch of coverage of some of the big protest actions being planned this fall, efforts to turn people’s attention away from the nonsense straw polls and candidate posturing and onto masses of people in the streets. I’ve been going to planning meetings for both those intending to…
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Stop Bombing Them
Sometimes, when one belongs to the richest and most militarily over-equipped country in the world, there’s a bit of a temptation to overthink things. I was reminded of this at the end of my interview—just published at The Immanent Frame—with the great Pakistani anthropologist Saba Mahmood. I asked the tangled question of what American women…
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The Rich Are Organized—Why Aren’t You?
At a time when, in the United States, majority opinions—like the need for tax increases, military-spending cuts, clean energy, and campaign finance reform—don’t seem to even be on the table in Washington, when whole neighborhoods and cities seem to have fallen off the political map, one might find oneself wondering: Where did our democracy go? Today at…
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The Suspicious Revolution
What does it do to people, and to a society, to suddenly become revolutionary? I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent…
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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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You Have Searched Me and Known Me
Over at The Daily—my latest commentary on consumer technology gets theological: Apple CEO Steve Jobs returned to the stage earlier this month to announce a long-awaited new product: iCloud. “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,” he said. “We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital…
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What’s at Stake in The Tree of Life?
If you’re into getting worked up about semi-artsy movies, the one you’re supposed to get worked up about lately is Terrence Malick’s new The Tree of Life. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. And got booed. You’re especially supposed to get worked up, it seems, if you’re into religion. At Killing the…
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Lull Me Into Rapture
Today at The Daily, the new tablet-only newspaper-ish publication, I have a short essay on the latest forthcoming apocalypse: About a decade ago, during a period of late-adolescent, almost apocalyptic urgency, with a sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism only a short time away, I discovered an unusual way to relax. At home, in my basement…
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Levitating Alien Mind Gods
After months of delays and excuses, I finally got around to doing an interview with Jeffrey Kripal, a religion professor at Rice University. It’s now up at The Immanent Frame. He’s one of the great oddballs in the study of religion today, about whom grad students whisper to each other, “It’s like he actually believes…
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How to Instigate a God Debate
Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism…