Posts
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The Gospel of Contradiction
Today at Religion Dispatches, I have an interview with novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon about her latest book, Reading Jesus. There are calls on the right and left—both in different ways—for more religious literacy. Are you, like those, urging people to know the Bible better? It depends on what you mean by “know.” Fundamentalists know…
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The Life and Death of the Death of God
There’s a whole subculture of people who, when the newspaper arrives, go straight for the obituaries. Well, now they’ve got their own, quite excellent literary website: Obit. All death, all the time. I’ve got a new essay there on the “death of God” theology of the 1960s, a bit of a follow-up to my recent…
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Beautiful Dreamers
Today at Religion Dispatches, I’ve got a review of the forthcoming documentary Oh My God. Filmmaker Peter Rodger goes on a sophomoric quest to talk with actors and other people all over the world about what God means to them. But the images are just wonderful. If Oh My God is propaganda of some kind,…
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Harvey Cox and the Future of Faith
I mentioned Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian best-known for his 1960s book The Secular City, in my recent Guardian piece on “death of God” theology. Today, at The Immanent Frame, I have an interview with him about his recent retirement ceremony, the legacy of his early-career bestseller, and his latest work, The Future of Faith,…
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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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Sackcloth on Wall Street
Religion Dispatches posted a crazy little blog post of mine, “Repentance on Wall Street?” It came to mind after getting the chance to hear yet another rousing talk by Cornel West (along with Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor) at an SSRC event at Cooper Union. His words and encouragement, such as they are,…
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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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Have You Heard of Rashi?
The day my essay, “The Self-Thinking Thought” appeared on the New York Times blog Happy Days, I received a letter that went thusly: I read your blog on Anselm; quite interesting. Your name sounds Jewish, and although you said you are Catholic, do you have Jewish ancestry? What do you know about Rashi, the great…
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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…