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Category: Religion

The Russian Orthodox leader at the core of Putin’s ambitions

The Russian Orthodox leader at the core of Putin’s ambitions

The New York Times reports: As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolded, Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, had an awkward Zoom meeting with Pope Francis. The two religious leaders had previously worked together to bridge a 1,000-year-old schism between the Christian churches of the East and West. But the meeting, in March, found them on opposing sides of a chasm. Kirill spent 20 minutes reading prepared remarks, echoing the arguments of President Vladimir V. Putin…

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How Islam settled Roe v. Wade centuries ago

How Islam settled Roe v. Wade centuries ago

Rashad Ali and Anna Lekas Miller write: As soon as the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, familiar — and troubling — Islamophobic tropes began to emerge in the discourse. “America’s Taliban really hates women and minorities,” wrote Daily Beast editor Naveed Jamali on Twitter, harkening back to late September when dozens of commentators, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, started referring to Texas lawmakers as the “American Taliban” — a trope that…

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I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale

I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood writes: In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for…

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The interdependence of all things

The interdependence of all things

Nicholas Cannariato writes: The nature of time. Black holes. Ancient philosophers. The struggle for democracy. Climate change. Buddhist philosophy. In his new collection of essays and articles, Carlo Rovelli, one of the world’s most renowned physicists, broadens his writing to include questions of politics, justice and how we live now. “I look at myself as much more than a physicist,” he said in an interview at his home in London, Ontario, on a cold, calm day in February. The new…

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Pope Francis tells pro-war Russian patriarch he ‘cannot transform himself into Putin’s altar boy’

Pope Francis tells pro-war Russian patriarch he ‘cannot transform himself into Putin’s altar boy’

CNN reports: Pope Francis warned the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, not to become “Putin’s altar boy,” he said in an interview this week. In his strongest words to date against the pro-war Patriarch, Francis also slammed Kirill for endorsing Russia’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine. “I spoke to him for 40 minutes via Zoom,” the Pope told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview published Tuesday. “The first 20 minutes he read to me, with…

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How trance states forged human society through transcendence

How trance states forged human society through transcendence

Mark Vernon writes: A change has come over the public discussion of religion in recent years. In the decade of the New Atheists, religion was the root of all evil. Nowadays, however, it tends to be thought of as a good, even necessary, part of society. In his recent book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019), the agnostic historian Tom Holland argues that Christianity underpins our civilisation; and the atheist philosopher John Gray has repeatedly stressed that atheism…

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The campaign against ‘Putin’s Pope’ — the Patriarch of Moscow who blessed the Ukraine invasion

The campaign against ‘Putin’s Pope’ — the Patriarch of Moscow who blessed the Ukraine invasion

Politico reports: Like a lot of insiders associated with Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev has faced calls for international ostracism in the weeks since the invasion of Ukraine. It’s no surprise why: He’s used his powerful Moscow perch to endorse the Kremlin’s attack on its neighbor, cheering on the troops and casting their mission as part of a civilizational battle against western decadence. But unlike the owner of a Russian airline or retail behemoth or energy concern, he’s not the…

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War in Ukraine is testing some American evangelicals’ support for Putin as a leader of conservative values

War in Ukraine is testing some American evangelicals’ support for Putin as a leader of conservative values

Vladimir Putin lights a candle as he attends an Orthodox Church service in 2011. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, pool By Melani McAlister, George Washington University In February 2022, evangelical leader Franklin Graham called on his followers to pray for Vladimir Putin. His tweet acknowledged that it might seem a “strange request” given that Russia was clearly about to invade Ukraine. But Graham asked that believers “pray that God would work in his heart so that war could be avoided at all…

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The seeds of political violence are being sown in churches across America

The seeds of political violence are being sown in churches across America

David French writes: On Thursday night in Castle Rock, Colorado, a group called “FEC United” (FEC stands for faith, education, and commerce) held a “town hall” meeting that featured a potpourri of GOP candidates and election conspiracy theorists. Most notably, the event included John Eastman, the Claremont scholar who authored the notorious legal memos that purported to justify the decertification and reversal of the 2020 election results. During the meeting, a man named Shawn Smith accused Colorado secretary of state…

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New report details the influence of Christian nationalism on the insurrection

New report details the influence of Christian nationalism on the insurrection

Religion News Service reports: A team of scholars, faith leaders and advocates unveiled an exhaustive new report Wednesday (Feb. 9) that documents in painstaking detail the role Christian nationalism played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling it an unsettling preview of things to come. Christian nationalism was used to “bolster, justify and intensify the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” said Amanda Tyler, head of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which sponsored the…

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80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

The New York Times reports: On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “The organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes. Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference that meticulously mapped it…

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How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

Law enforcement officials outside Congregation Beth Israel synagogue on Jan. 15, 2022, in Colleyville, Texas. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez By Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University The man who took a rabbi and three congregants hostage in Colleyville, Texas, on Jan. 15, 2022, believed that Jews control the United States of America. He told his hostages, as one revealed in a media interview, that Jews “control the world” and that they could use their perceived power to free Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani…

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Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism

Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism

Yair Rosenberg writes: Most people do not realize that Jews make up just 2 percent of the U.S. population and 0.2 percent of the world’s population. This means simply finding them takes a lot of effort. But every year in Western countries, including America, Jews are the No. 1 target of anti-religious hate crimes. Anti-Semites are many things, but they aren’t lazy. They’re animated by one of the most durable and deadly conspiracy theories in human history. This past Saturday…

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The forgotten role of religion in science writing

The forgotten role of religion in science writing

Adam Shapiro writes: It’s been nearly 30 years—a generation!—since professional science communication as a field began to seriously push back against what’s been called the knowledge deficit model (sometimes just called the “deficit model.”) (See “The Trust Fallacy,” July–August 2021.) That model describes a way of thinking about people’s understanding and acceptance of scientific knowledge, supposing that the greatest barrier to scientific literacy was a lack—or deficit—of information about a topic. If only people better understood evolution, the thinking went,…

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Churches target new members, with help from Big Data

Churches target new members, with help from Big Data

The Wall Street Journal reports: Struggling with grief? Too much debt? On the verge of divorce? Churches are ready to deliver a digital intervention, with help from Big Data. A small company called Gloo has put itself at the forefront of an effort to analyze Americans’ personal data and online activities to help churches reach people most likely to be open to their messages and join their congregations. The more surgical method of evangelization borrows techniques long used by businesses…

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