Reframing Religions as Platforms
In The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People, Paul Seabright draws on insights from economics to reframe religions as competing “platforms.” By Swayam Bagaria
Category: Books
Dancing with the Demiurge
Gregory Shaw’s Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus is a critique of the metaphysics of our age, which disempower the imagination and blind us to our own capacities for the divine. By Simon Cox
Descending Into the Underworld
A Q&A with Ahmad Greene-Hayes on his new book Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans. By Janan Graham-Russell
Small Revelations
Garth Greenwell’s latest novel, Small Rain, centers attention as a moral discipline and asks how art can help us live. By Sarah Fleming
A Very Special (and Mysterious) Day
A Q&A with Jon D. Levenson on his new book, Israel’s Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath. By Faye Bodley-Dangelo
The Children at 80
Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense offers a still relevant perspective on the idealistic and cynical tendencies in US democracy. By Bradley Shingleton
Honoring Lives Ravaged by Addiction
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Donovan X. Ramsey’s When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era offer powerful narratives in the context of communities beset by addiction epidemics. By Mara Willard
‘A Pedagogy of Coming to See’
A Q&A with Francis X. Clooney, S.J., about his memoir Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story. By Wendy McDowell
Knowing Animals: Buddhist and Posthuman Resources for a New Interspecies Ethics
A selected reading list from Janet Gyatso’s course.
The Smoldering Superhuman
Jeffrey J. Kripal’s The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities calls for a “postcritical” study of religion that embraces more expansive anthropologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. By Charles M. Stang
Dreaming of Superhumans: New Reactionary Nietzschean Fantasies
A fresh round of reactionary groups are appropriating Friedrich Nietzsche to promote virulent new strains of the “superhuman.” By Nicholas E. Low
Speaking “Sex” into Living Languages
A Q&A with Mark D. Jordan on his new book, Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires. By Faye Bodley-Dangelo
Reframing Forgiveness
A Q&A with Matthew Ichihashi Potts on his latest book, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account. By Suzie Greco
Rooting in Relationality
Recent publications on plant consciousness invite us to rethink our entanglements with plant life and our understanding of ourselves among other species. By Natalia Schwien Scott
Paths of Coincidence in Thomas Hardy
The melodramatic aspects of Thomas Hardy’s novels lend themselves to an examination of the ordinary uncertainty of life—the landscape of Michael Jackson’s Coincidences: Synchronicity, Verisimilitude, and Storytelling. By Maria Cecilia Holt
The Trouble with Oneness
Three recent books offer helpful frameworks for considering temperament and conversion in experiences of “oneness with nature.” By Shane Baker
Climate Grief and the Secular Spirituality of Earth-Mourning
We need to approach earth-mourning as a necessary spiritual practice that reckons with the disorienting power of grief and the potential for meaningful change. By Dorothy Dean
Ecotheology
A selected reading list from Dan McKanan’s course.
Words in the Blood
In Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk, Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. exposes the toxic allure of blood imagery in Christian art, literature, and practices. By Mark D. Jordan
Prison Theology
Austin Reed’s antebellum memoir The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict subverts notions of incarceration as spiritually regenerative. By Klaus C. Yoder
