Four stories on belief: from the allure of cults and conspiracy theories, to the effect of trauma on faith, to the way dogma has influenced science – and if technology can actually shift our beliefs.
Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The Pilgrims were thankful for finally being able to vanquish Thomas Morton and Ferdinando Gorges, who spent years trying to undermine the legal basis for settlements in Massachusetts and beyond.
About one-quarter of the world’s countries, both in developing and developed economies, have anti-blasphemy laws. Their implementation is always controversial and highly politicised.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of love was not sentimental. It demanded that individuals tell their oppressors what they were doing was wrong. How can this vision help with community-building today?
50 years after Time magazine’s famous ‘Is God Dead?’ cover, Church attendance numbers are tumbling. But that doesn’t mean Christianity is on the way out.
How white Republicans and white Democrats feel about Muslims is influencing their candidate choice as well as willingness to vote in the 2016 election.
‘Sport is my religion’ isn’t just a cute bumper sticker. Athletes create rituals, endure suffering and face their own mortality. Under the right circumstances, sport can be a powerful – and secular – spiritual practice.
The Oujia board’s origins were anything but evil. It emerged, in part, out of a longing to communicate with loved ones who had died during the Civil War.
A new book on Buddhism in South Africa is more than a beautiful coffee table book. If Zen ever finds a foothold in Africa, the truths the book reveals could be seen as monumental.
Many people believe they have a soul. But for psychologists, who study behaviour, it is not so much that souls do not exist, it is that there is no need for them.
Director of the Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Policy & Associate Professor, New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity