Knocking At The Gate

Writing in The Hedgehog Review , Yale professor Phillip Gorski examines the roots of resurgent authoritarian movements all over the world, and how the conflicts between immanence and transcendence in religion are manifested in political belief: In the American context, these phenomena are usually attributed to populist ideology, racial backlash, or Christian nationalism. Such explanations are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They cannot explain certain puzzling features of the MAGA movement that are also evident outside the American context, including the outlandish behavior of the political leaders, the swirl of conspiracy theories that often surrounds them, or the lack of any clear policy platform. Nor do those explanations account for the enthralling worldviews of the new authoritarian movements, which mix religion, magic, conspiracy, and popular culture in a toxic stew. Historical anthropology and cultural sociology can help us here by placing neoauthoritarianism i...

Professor of Religious Studies Alejandro Nava writes in American Scholar : I don’t deny that these genres are flawed and ambiguous, and sometimes deserve their reputation as “devil’s music”—as when they promote toxic masculinity, sexism, violence, gross materialism, nihilism, and a culture of drug use. But what may seem predictable and uniform to a distant observer, like a view of the ocean from above, can contain remarkable depth, variety, and idiosyncrasy. From this perspective, I suspect that a listener may come away with what I have known: the genre’s bursting joy and inventiveness, its thrilling beats, its love of rhyme and rhetorical extravagance, its portraits of racial injustice, its longing for freedom and equality, its pining for God.  Full article here.

This review contains spoilers. We saw Darren Aronofsky's 2017 Mother! yesterday, with Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Ed Harris. This movie was incredibly divisive with some audiences loving it and some loathing it. After viewing it, I'm definitely in the "loving" category. The film is an unapologetic religious allegory, with only minimal effort made to connect it to the realist cinema we now take for granted. As was the case with The Last Temptation of Christ some years ago, I can imagine that some believers may find the movie moving and some will find it offensive. It may also baffle people who are not familiar with religious stories, or who miss some of the allegory. The picture is mythological and not theological, drawing on mostly on Abrahamic traditions with some Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist themes as well. I expect that some of the audiences who hated it weren't prepared for the hard-to-categorize form of this fil...