About a month ago, a rather extraordinary fellow named Saji Thomas contacted me about a Kathakali performance he was arranging at the Indian Cultural Center and Temple complex out east of Memphis. Saji-ji turned out to be a real force of nature that picked up everything and everyone and moved them along in the direction of the purpose. The consequence was a lovely, Sunday afternoon performance of a Ravana story performed by K. Shanmukhan. The occasion also afforded me the... Read more
Physicist Lawrence Krauss apparently suggested this past week that religion could disappear in a single generation if we were to plant doubt effectively in the world’s children. As happened with slavery and opposition to gay marriage, Krauss implied, religion could simply go away as a population of children come into adulthood carrying an intuitive recognition of religion’s not-true-ness. It’s very difficult not to characterize Krauss’s suggestion as an expression of faith. As Douglas Jacobsen showed in a response to Krauss,... Read more
Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on Politics in the Pulpit. Read other perspectives here. On a warm summer evening in 1833, the good citizens of Jackson County, Missouri, gathered in a town meeting to determine by democratic deliberation how to handle the Mormon problem. Subsequently, these good citizens tarred and feathered the local Mormon bishop in broad daylight in the town square, burned the Mormons’ printing shop, and drove every last Mormon from the... Read more
The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the 7th century, BCE, cylinder seal as “Hero with bow and quiver grasping ostrich“. But this description of what the seal depicts completely ignores the item’s most interesting imagery. Represented on the piece alongside the hunter is a religious ritual, apparently in process, involving some kind of altar, the veneration of an icon, and at least two guys dressed up as fish.* If we were crass, ignorant bumpkins, we would guffaw over how dopey those old... Read more
I had work to do, in my hotel room, while attending the great, big Conference on South Asia in Wisconsin this past week. I made the mistake of clicking on the television, which put me in the first few minutes of Pleasantville. That was it for the next two hours. Old Yeller makes me cry, every time. And Pleasantville always hits me right in the weeper. I also play Call of Duty. It’s not like I’m not a manly man.... Read more
Let’s talk about condiments. It turns out that spicy pickles reveal a lot about religion. In the New Yorker a decade ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote at some length about mustard, ketchup, and spaghetti sauce. According to Gladwell, back in the 1970’s, a fellow named Howard Moskowitz figured out that the way to break open the super-conservative spaghetti sauce market was not to identify better what everyone is looking for, collectively, but to identify the different things that clusters of people... Read more
I’m going to break a sacred rule which I would, myself, insist my own students follow slavishly. I’m going to comment on a movie I haven’t seen, and, god willing, will never see. Go ahead, give me an ‘F’. If I were my student, that’s what I’d do. The movie I have in mind is Meet the Mormons, opening soon and with a glossy smile at a theatre near you. I won’t see this movie because, speaking from some experience,... Read more
When U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups determined that Utah’s constitutional ban on polygamy was unconstitutional last month, I thought my lifelong Mormon dream had finally come true. I jumped in my car and drove eight hours from Memphis to Atlanta, so I could catch a JetBlue flight to Salt Lake City (keep the money in the family, you know). I went immediately to the county clerk’s office. “I’d like a marriage license, please.” I went through the obligatory “name, rank, and serial... Read more
One tag line the Sunday Assembly has used reads: “All the best bits of church, but with no religion and some awesome pop songs.” Established in Britain in early 2013, the Sunday Assembly wanted the community, the joyful expression, the affirmation of life, the meeting and greeting, etc., etc., that people often find in church, but without the crap imputed to god and the unfriendliness that that crap often entails. Good on ’em, as the Brits say (or something like... Read more
I don’t have anything against atheists. Atheism makes perfect sense to me. Really. Half the time, I am an atheist. There’s no empirical evidence for a super-being god, so we may as well believe in spaghetti monsters. Granted. But the argument that sometimes emerges from atheism’s justified efforts to defend itself that the march of the world toward enlightenment will eventually, inexorably, inevitably, eliminate religion altogether seems to me a fantasy. I can see humanity eventually giving up on the... Read more
Aestheism
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