“It is time for the truth to be told and for people to realize the attack on women is actually from Satan himself.” Joyce Meyer makes this provocative proclamation in her 2006 book The Confident Woman, in which the celebrity preacher argues that women are equal in God’s eyes and must fight for their rights within the church and society. In fact, often men’s “egos” prevent women from fulfilling their calling to minister or teach. “Historically, women have often been allowed to... Read more

The Rev. Samuel Cruz went into a meeting at his Sunset Park church last month as his bishop’s sole nominee for dean of the southwest Brooklyn conference of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He would have been the first member of a minority group to represent the area’s eight parishes, most of which date to when the area had a large Norwegian population. The nomination, an aide to the bishop said, recognized Pastor Cruz’s efforts to reinvigorate Trinity Lutheran... Read more

Atheism is intellectually fashionable. In the past month, The New York Timeshas run several stories about lack of faith in its series on religion. The New Yorker ran an article on the history of non-belief in reaction to two new books on the subject that were released within a week of each other in February. The veteran writer, Adam Gopnik, concludes this: What the noes, whatever their numbers, really have now … is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same... Read more

Christians miss insight into divine breadth without its female expression and distort perspective when male divine dimensions dominate. Yet the Ultimate, known by diverse forms and names, is neither sexual nor limited as our descriptors may suggest. Wisdom or the Spirit figure—Hokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek and Sapientia in Latin—has for centuries personified God. Non-biblical religions also include forms of female, creative, divine energy known by terms like Shekinah, Shakti, and Chi. This blog introduces the concept and encourages the reader to further study. Twenty years ago... Read more

I have been doing a lot of thinking about gendered imagery and language for God over the past few months. Honestly, a lot of this reflection was provoked by hostile comments I got from my college students at the end of the fall semester because I require gender-neutral language for God and gender-inclusive language when referring to people. The policy in my syllabus is this: For academic discourse, spoken and written, students are expected to use gender-inclusive language for human... Read more

Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality? Religion and the Burdens of Black Sexual Politics Columbia University, Institute for Research in African-American Studies  October 23-24, 2014 Please submit a detailed abstract of your paper or panel to [email protected] by April 15, 2014. Individual paper proposals should be no more than 250 words. Panel proposals (including all paper titles and names of panelists) should be no more than 500 words. Additionally, please include a brief biographical statement or CV with your proposal. On October 23-24, 2014, the... Read more

In Hadassah: One Night With the King, a popular 2004 novelization of the Book of Esther, the queen describes her first night alone with the king of Persia. Apparently she had a great time: … our mutual hunger raged unchecked—at no time did I even think of demurring or becoming submissive, for my desire for him was genuine. I had fallen in love with him. I had seen past his outer facade … and now I had reached his heart. This... Read more

To begin with, religions – Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and so on – are growing numerically, and their members worldwide are increasingly unwilling to keep their convictions and practices limited to the private sphere of family or religious community. Instead, they want these convictions and practices to shape public life. They may engage in electoral politics and seek to influence legislative processes (as the Religious Right has done in the United States ever since the Reagan presidency), or they may... Read more

Neil deGrasse Tyson has been called many things. Groundbreaking astronomer. Dynamic communicator. Sexiest astrophysicist alive. But what about public theologian? It might sound crazy, but the recent reboot of the television show Cosmos: A Personal Journey— Carl Sagan’s classic 1980s exploration of all things science, this time starring the charismatic Tyson and renamed “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” — is already attracting more attention for what it says about religion than astrophysics. The show, which premiered Sunday night, begins roughly as expected, with... Read more

In his now classic work, God: A Biography, Ancient Near Eastern scholar Jack Miles offers a developmental reading of the character of God in the Bible. Taking seriously the characterization and chronology of the narrative, God, Miles says, has never been god for anyone before. His potency notwithstanding, God’s lack of experience will manifest itself strikingly in the opening chapters of Genesis, as he struggles to deal with his surprisingly non-compliant creatures who thwart his plans and subvert his intentions at... Read more