Religion Dispatches has an interesting article up this morning entitled “When the Gods Die: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett Take the 70s With Them” by Anthea Butler. Butler is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester and teaches in the areas of African American religious history, American religious history, and women and gender [...]
Unless you’re working the night shift and have just woken up for work, you probably already know that Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop, died earlier this afternoon of a heart attack. Since his passing, the cable news networks have been debating his place in music history: who is greater Elvis, The Beatles, or [...]
Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting a local artist, Pamela Blotner, works in sculpture, drawing, and illustrations. Hopefully, she’ll be offering some courses on religion/spirituality and the arts at the Graduate Theological Union through the Center for Arts and Religious Education in the near future. She occasionally teaches at Pixar as well. Check out [...]
Here are the final selections from my interview with Barry Taylor. In these videos, he discusses the fading sacred/secular divide in popular culture as well as atheistic sacrality and contemporary art. Good stuff.
A new interreligious website recently launched called Patheos. It’s a much needed concept that offers different religious perspectives on pressing issues. It has a host of lenses through which to compare different religious responses to both new and age old questions. For this week’s edition on the meaning of existence, I was asked to write [...]
Actually, Rainn Wilson has started up an interesting website called Soul Pancake that wants to “make discussions about Spirituality, Creativity, and Philosophy cool again.” The site encourages users to “Chew on Life’s Big Questions,” the ones that “gnaw at our innards.” My seminary professors referred to those as 3 a.m. questions…those that either kept you [...]
In their song, “Live Free,” Son Volt sings, “The season has changed; I want to see you in it; The lights that shine are caustic without you.” As a deeply religious and spiritual person, seasons are important to me. Because I’ve lived in various places where seasons come and go in different ways, I often [...]
Friday night, after the public forum at the Transforming Theology Conference, some participants and students stuck around for a theo-pub. It didn’t take long for Philip Clayton and Tony Jones to get down to an intense debate over issues of emergence and emergents. Check out the first half of the discussion posted here in the [...]
So I am at the Transforming Theology Conference where forty of the best and brightest theologians have gathered to discuss transformative thought for progressive action. The first panel of four theologians included Harvey Cox, Delwin Brown, Joseph Bracken, and Ignacio Castuera. They each posed seven minute thoughts on the perils that we as a society [...]
Two films that deal with religion in different ways release today. You can laugh, cry, or scream at Bill Maher’s documentary, Religulous, one of my top spiritual films of 2008. You can also catch Angelina Jolie’s Oscar-nominated performance in Changeling. Also of note in the latter is John Malcovich’s performance as a minister, The Rev. [...]
