Category: Winter/Spring 2011

Christianity Becomes Unfamiliar

As Christianity’s center of gravity shifts, the emerging field of world Christianity is changing the study of world religions. By Devaka Premawardhana

Patterns from Particularities

Jean DeBernardi’s The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia and Leor Halevi’s Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. by Steven P. Hopkins

The Rationalization of Suffering

Christianity and psychiatry advance opposite models of suffering, leading to complex negotiations in the lives of patients and in the wider culture. By James Davies

New Bridges across Old Divides

Ann Taves’s Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. By Scott Appleby

Playing Jane

Separated by 150 years, the life stories of two black Mormon women reveal how believers at the margins of a faith can move the center. By Max Perry Mueller

Jesus on the Border

The name of Jesus is invoked to support a range of opinions about illegal immigration. By Ananda Rose Robinson

Cherishing Our Strangeness

Confronting our definitions is not merely an intellectual exercise—it can alter the way we see the world and ourselves in it, shaking and sometimes even ending our faith. By Wendy McDowell

Acts of Devotion

A writer’s encounter with iconography in Patmos, Greece, challenges commonly accepted ideas about artistic originality and intention. By D. Y. Béchard

Judge Not Celebrities!

Our culture’s unhealthy preoccupation with celebrities leads to condemning sins and discounting good deeds. By Cathleen Falsani

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