Category: Autumn 2005

A Mission to China Debriefed

Eric Reinders’s Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. By Patrick Provost-Smith

Resolution Where There May Never Be

The writers and artists included in this issue approach their difficult subjects with calm, open determination, with the attitude that creative thinking can still be applied even to those human situations that allow virtually no hope. By Will Joyner

Pleasure Principles

Discussion of recent sex crises in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches is frozen by journalistic polarization. A look back at Gregory of Nyssa, and Freud, might help. By Sarah Coakley

Judaist Israel, Islamist Palestine

The ability of the United States to function as mediator in the Holy Land may require a new American attention to religion. By Jack Miles

Darfur’s Unfinished Story

How did a little-known, and largely ignored, region in western Sudan become the site of such horrific suffering? The answers do not come easily. By Chris Herlinger

From Theologian to Pope

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, he was portrayed to the public primarily in bumper sticker clichés. One of his former students takes a more nuanced look. By Francis Schüssler Fiorenza

The Politics of Memory

Archaeologies of the Greek Past by Susan Alcock and Martyrdom and Memory by Elizabeth Castelli. By Laura Nasrallah

Darwin’s Pope?

Has “intelligent design” found a clear-cut friend in Pope Benedict XVI? By Kenneth R. Miller

Buddhist Studies the Buddhist Way

Scholars of religion should do a better job of contemplating Buddhism with an eye to theoretical axioms that exist in the tradition’s classic texts themselves. By J. C. Cleary

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