Slate Magazine - Faith-Based

It's time to bring relics back to the Catholic Church.

David Farley — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:08:38 EST

Some believe that listening to heavy metal and soaking in its sometimes faux macabre culture can lead to the devil. It led me instead to a fascination with holy relics. I was perhaps the only teenager in my suburban Los Angeles town who yearned to see bones and other pieces of sanctified stiffs encased in glass. That was what drew me to ask an ancient woman at my Catholic church's administration office what relic was housed in the church's altar—a simple question, I thought. She admitted that not only had she never been asked that question, but she had no idea and called in Father Dennis. He was equally in the dark.

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It's becoming increasingly difficult for Israel to unplug for Yom Kippur.

Michael Weiss — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:07:41 EST

Yom Kippur is devoted to atonement and forgiveness—or "conscience consciousness-raising," as I once heard a rabbi still recovering from the '70s phrase it. In itself, the purpose of the holiday needn't really affect day-to-day life, except that observance takes the form of a 25-hour fast and the total abstention from physical labor and the use of technology. Jews in the Diaspora spend most of Yom Kippur at home or in synagogue, where the absence of electricity hardly affects the greater gentile grids. But in Israel, which effectively shuts down for Yom Kippur, the contradiction between ancient religious tradition and modernity is brought into stark relief once a year, creating either a brief trance of neo-Luddite serenity or a sliver of Dark Age privation.

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Do shamans have more sex? Why New Age spirituality is no more pure than old-time religion.

Robert Wright — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:59:10 EST

Wouldn't it be great to be back in hunter-gatherer days? Back before the human spiritual quest had been corrupted by the "relentless onslaught of Western scientific materialism" and "dogmatic male-dominated religion"? Back when there were shamans—spiritual leaders—who could plug us into "the realm of the magical," show us "the reality behind apparent reality," and thus lead us to understand "how the universe really works"?

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The arrests of rabbis who trafficked body parts uncover more complicated issues.

Benyamin Cohen — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:11:16 EST

With the right ingredients of salaciousness and scandal, the news appeared to be straight out of a Hollywood screenplay: corrupt politicians, money laundering, people being arrested by the busload, raids on synagogues, an Apple Jacks cereal box stuffed with $97,000 in cash, and rabbis trafficking organs. Allegedly, one paid $10,000 to an impoverished Israeli for his or her kidney and tried to sell it for upward of $150,000 in the United States. The criminal complaint quotes the rabbi as saying he was in the organ business for a decade. (And in a you-can't-make-this-stuff-up twist, it wasn't even the day's only story on Israelis trafficking human body parts.)

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How will Prosperity Gospel ride out the hard economic times?

Clint Rainey — Wed, 8 Jul 2009 13:11:11 EST

In times of record-high foreclosures and Treasury Department scrambling to shore up loan-refinancing initiatives, the Prosperity Gospel can sound as if it comes from preachers who live under rocks, not in mansions: "God wants to give you your own house," big-cheese pitchman Joel Osteen announced in 2007's Your Best Life Now, which he penned in an economic Indian summer of a bull market and excited homebuyers. " 'How could that ever happen to me?' you ask. 'I don't make enough money.' Perhaps not, but our God is well able."

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