Category: Our Anthropocene Future

As I write, significant swaths of New York and New Jersey remain uninhabitable more than a month after Superstorm Sandy churned ashore. Sandy followed in the footsteps of Hurricane Irene, which savaged much of the same territory just fourteen months earlier. Sandy seems to have marked a turning point in the way most media commentators …

  Introduction: The Island Analogy This truly extraordinary point in Earth’s history has recently been categorized as a distinct geological time period–the Anthropocene–a period of significant human impact on the planet. Our species is unique relative to all other life-forms in that we have a developed sense of consciousness. Not only do our activities dominate …

When I covered Billy Graham’s Crusade in Flushing Meadows, Queens, back in 2005, I did not realize that I was reporting on the end of an era for the man dubbed “America’s pastor.” Still, given his frail health at that time, I was not surprised when the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) announced that Graham’s …

I received my religious education in Sunday school, as a Jew. It was shortly after the Holocaust, and the Jewish community was eager to ensure the perpetuation of Judaism. Intermarriage—even mere exposure to Christianity—were viewed as palpable threats. My religious education said nothing at all aboutChristianity. My parents’ understanding of Christianity was limited to a …

  One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.…You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been t he religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the …

Despite overwhelming historical and contemporary evidence providing testimony to the incendiary role of hatred in igniting fires of violence, murder, war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and terrorism–to say nothing of demagoguery and political gridlock–relatively little sociological research has been conducted to date on the subject of hate as such. Sociologists, myself included, have studied hate as …

One major topic that impacts on the reliability of the Gospels is the rate at which myth or legend can grow and overcome the recollection of historical events, whether in the oral tradition or in the subsequent written record of that oral tra dition. Some argue that the Gospels cannot be mostly legend, as many …