Winter/Spring 2011
Remapping World Religions
Featured
The Moral Imagination of Wilfred Cantwell Smith
For this contentious thinker, studying religion is an art which involves a community of both practitioners and scholars. By Donald K. Swearer
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
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
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
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
Dialogue
Whence and for Whom Do We Study Religion?
Some poignant questions about the intertwining of faith communities and scholarship. By Laura S. Nasrallah
Jesus on the Border
The name of Jesus is invoked to support a range of opinions about illegal immigration. By Ananda Rose Robinson
Ground Zero and the ‘S-word’
What kind of American national identity is constructed when Ground Zero is defined as “sacred space”? By Matthew J. Cressler
Judge Not Celebrities!
Our culture’s unhealthy preoccupation with celebrities leads to condemning sins and discounting good deeds. By Cathleen Falsani
In Review
Books
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
Books
An Anemic ‘American Way’
Thomas S. Kidd’s God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. By David D. Hall
Books
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
Books | Film
Ash and Breath: Christ on ‘The Road’
A Christological reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the film based on it. By Charles M. Stang
Poetry
Memory Room
By Davide Trame
to the house sparrows, dispossessed
By Gwendolyn Jensen
Perspective
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
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