Syrmor interviews DJ Soto, a Christian pastor who is looking to redefine what faith looks like. As Soto tells it, part of his interest in taking up a virtual house of prayer is that it opens up the experience to people who might otherwise be excluded from real-world congregations, such as folks in wheelchairs and recovering drug addicts. Soto describes one instance where he baptized a woman who couldn’t leave her home, and the experience was so intense that she started “bawling,” as she never thought she’d have the opportunity to do it given her condition. His service also allows him to reach people he couldn’t if he preached solely through typical avenues. He has been performing virtual reality baptisms for a year now.

It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics. What is our collective approach to health care, after all, if not rooted in a visceral sense that the unlucky are responsible for their own misfortune? What is our willingness to vote a man like Trump into office but a collective cultural reward for those who brand themselves as successful?

Muslims thus arrived in America more than a century before the Virginia Company founded the Jamestown colony in 1607. Muslims came to America more than a century before the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Muslims were living in America not only before Protestants, but before Protestantism existed. After Catholicism, Islam was the second monotheistic religion in the Americas. The popular misunderstanding, even among educated people, that Islam and Muslims are recent additions to America tells us important things about how American history has been written. In particular, it reveals how historians have justified and celebrated the emergence of the modern nation-state. One way to valorise the United States of America has been to minimise the heterogeneity and scale – the cosmopolitanism, diversity and mutual co-existence of peoples – in America during the first 300 years of European presence. [...] If there is any religious group who represents the best version of religious freedom in America, it is Muslims such as Zemourri and al-Rahman. They came to America under conditions of genuine oppression, and struggled for the recognition of their religion and the freedom to practise it. In contrast to Anglo-Protestants, Muslims in America have demurred the impulse to tyrannise others, including Native Americans. The most persistent consequence of the Puritan effect has been a continuing commitment to producing a past focused on how the actions, usually courageous and principled, of Anglo-Protestants (almost always in New England and the Chesapeake) led to the United States of America, its government and its institutions. The truth is that the history of America is not primarily an Anglo-Protestant story, any more than the history of the West more broadly. It might not be a straightforward or self-evident matter what, exactly, constitutes ‘the West’. But the more global era in history inaugurated by the European colonisation of the Western hemisphere must be a significant part of it. If the West means, in part, the Western hemisphere or North America, Muslims have been part of its societies from the very beginning. Conflicts over what the American nation is and who belongs to it are perennial. Answers remain open to a range of possibilities and are vitally important. Historically, Muslims are Americans, as originally American as Anglo-Protestants. In many ways, America’s early Muslims are exemplars of the best practices and ideals of American religion. Any statement or suggestion to the contrary, no matter how well-meaning, derives from either intended or inherited chauvinism.

The ongoing debate between the scientific and the miraculous, as seen through a very thin piece of fabric: the Shroud of Turin.

This piece of pseudo-profanity is what’s known as a taboo deformation—a word we say when we don’t want to say the word.

All the things I should've told my students about being a Muslim and a woman and an American.

Fearfulness obscures the distinction between real threat on one hand and on the other the terrors that beset those who see threat everywhere. … A “civilian” Kalashnikov can easily be modified into a weapon that would blast a deer to smithereens. That’s illegal, of course, and unsportsmanlike. I have heard the asymmetry rationalized thus: deer can’t shoot back. Neither can adolescents in a movie theater, of course. … As for America, we have a way of plunging into wars we weary of and abandon after a few years and a few thousand casualties, having forgotten what our object was; these wars demonstrate an overwhelming power to destroy without any comparable regard to life and liberty, to the responsibilities of power, that would be consistent with maintaining our good name. We throw away our status in the world at the urging of those who think it has nothing to do with our laws and institutions, impressed by the zeal of those supernumeraries who are convinced that it all comes down to shock and awe and boots on the ground. This notion of glory explains, I suppose, some part of the fantasizing, the make-believe wars against make-believe enemies, and a great many of the very real Kalashnikovs.

Perhaps it was just as well, then, that the exhibition did not include a Sallman painting familiarly known as "Sputnik Christ." Painted in the late 1950's, it shows a monumental Jesus standing atop Earth, his figure extending into outer space, with planets, meteors and satellites whizzing by.

Secular graces.

An overview.

There are jailed dissenters around the world, with harsher sentences for lesser crimes, wasting in silence. We shouldn’t forget them and we shouldn’t forget the message Pussy Riot was trying to spread. However, we should let rebellion and reform grow organically from within a country and then foster and support it with an outsider’s perspective; we shouldn’t place ourselves and our lives and our Twitter feeds directly into someone else’s story and someone else’s struggle. If it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.

Asimov’s favorite of his short stories, and widely regarded to have an astonishing ending.

Remembering the 70s/80s occult boom in NYC.

The story of Jason Rohrer’s ‘Chain World’, a customized fork of Minecraft of which there is only a single copy available on a USB stick and which is meant to be played only once, following a strict set of commandments, and then passed on to someone else. It’s meant to be a game about religion.

The history of AA and some insight on why some of its most important characteristics — no central organization, a focus on group therapy, the replacement of meetings as an obsession — are why it works so well for so many.

"Meanwhile, in Oregon, the mosque sometimes attended by Mohamud was victimized today by arson. So the FBI did not stop any actual Terrorist plots, but they may have helped inspire one."

"'I stuck her with my wang. She hit me in the balls. I grabbed her by her neck. And I bounced her off the walls. She said it was an accident and then apologised. But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.' That's clearly a song about domestic violence. So your Christian message is... don't be like that man?" "Huh?" Violent J repeats, mystified.

"A historian traces the moment when Boston’s dour preachers embraced the market."

A short essay on Ghandi's faith. Intriguing. I would like to study this further at some point.

Wild and sad.

"That's some serious neanderthal action going on."

An ad campaign for atheism in London is aiming to counter religious ads, one bus billboard at a time.

Interesting, though I do not totally agree. (Is Christianity not itself a tribe? An ideological one, at least, if not geographically contiguous.) There is the same food for thought here that I've been chewing on for years... it is a conundrum I cannot reconcile.

"2012 is claimed by some to be a great year of spiritual transformation (or apocalypse)." And no more foie gras in California.

"...the war is not what the media or the leaders of the religious right would have you think it is. It’s not Blue States vs. Red States. I think the Times has it right: The front line is within the red states"

"It is my mission to correctly re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the bookstore." Putting pseudo-scientific books about religion in the Religion section. Or Religious Fiction section. Or New Age section.

"It is important to preserve this period of American history, or more exactly, the history of our (perhaps unique, or at least extreme) American propensity to believe the strangest things, to have the strangest practices."

"Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis, have created a glossy simulacrum of a museum, a slick imitation of a scientific enterprise veneered over long disproved religious fables..."

A walk through the new museum about Creationism.

"God is all-powerful. Therefore, God can do anything, and regenerating a leg is trivial."