Religion

In Search of Arab Jews

Can a culture be resurrected?

  • Samuel Hayim Brody

The Migrant Pope

Francis challenged the ethnonationalism of the U.S. Catholic right. With the election of Leo XIV, the battle lines are being retraced. 

  • Travis Knoll

There’s a Word for That

Can language describe everything we feel—and should it?

  • James D. Reich

A Moral Evil

The Pope’s call for gay blessings is not what it seems. 

  • Richard D. Mohr

False Messiahs

How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism.

  • Barnett R. Rubin

Salvation Now

Fifty years ago, religion met Marxism in the liberation theology movement. Its message still serves.

  • Travis Knoll

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One Bureau under God

Jeanne Theoharis speaks with Lerone A. Martin about the white Christian legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

  • Lerone A. Martin
  • Jeanne Theoharis

What Is “the Jews”?

Daniel Boyarin makes the seemingly paradoxical proposal that in order to end Zionism, Jewishness should be defined as nationhood.

  • Joshua Abramson Cohen

Will U.S.-Israel Policies Ever Change?

They might, given growing disaffection with Israel among young American Jews.

  • Jeremy Pressman

Black Spirit, Black Struggle

When Desmond Tutu reconciled African theology and Black theology.

  • Panashe Chigumadzi
  • Cornel West

The New Faith-Based Discrimination

A sharp uptick in challenges to U.S. antidiscrimination laws threatens decades of progress in extending civil rights to all.

  • Louise Melling

You Owe Me an Argument

Epiphanies can prompt us to view the world differently, a new book contends. But they are no substitute for ethical and political debate.

  • Rachel Fraser

Grooming and the Christian Politics of Innocence

Challenges to Christian political control are often spun as threats to child welfare.

  • Michael Bronski

The U.S. Christians Who Pray for Putin

The mystical connection between white Southern nostalgia, the global family values movement, and Russia.

  • Bethany Moreton

In Search of Foucault’s Last Words

Against the philosopher’s dying wish, the final volume of History of Sexuality has now been published. How should we approach it?

  • Mark D. Jordan

Seeking Certainty in Uncertain Times

An anthropologist reflects on West African divination as a case study in hope during times of great uncertainty.

  • Michael Jackson

What Does Europe Have Against Halal?

Food is becoming a target for anti-Islam politics.

  • John R. Bowen

Is There a Right to Heresy?

A proposed French bill says so. But, strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as blasphemy within the terms of secular public order.

  • Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
  • Nadia Marzouki

Algerian Jews Have Not Forgotten France’s Colonial Crimes

A recent report neglects to mention how France forced Arab Jews to adopt the European persona of Jew as citizen and see Arabs and Muslims as others.

  • Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Can We Deduce Our Way to Salvation?

A new book suggests that modern readers can still follow the path of reason that Spinoza traced to true well-being, but they might not want to.

  • Carlos Fraenkel

Mourning in Tehran

On Ashura, Shi’a Muslims grieve the Prophet’s grandson. But with Iran crippled by COVID-19 and U.S. sanctions, it was also an occasion this year to mourn the country’s deaths from disease and despair.

  • Nargol Aran

The Angel of History

Pestilence and plague have often prompted waves of apocalyptic thinking, calling into question the steady march of progress in human history.

  • John Merrick

Repertoires of Rage

Anger’s history—along with the very fact that it has one—can shed light on the hypertrophied emotional climate of today.

  • David Konstan

Dying in Jerusalem

The city is running out of graves, and against the backdrop of the Israel–Palestine conflict, burial is often a political matter.

  • Etan Nechin
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