Killing the Buddha

Thomas More’s Utopia was a joke that nobody got—especially in the New World.

“You get here what you cannot find anywhere else: pure human beings.”

Manisha tells the story of how she came to the place of death.

Time to feed the skulls.

Tantra isn’t about sex but feeding insatiable goddesses the sexual emissions they crave.

Welcome to the burning grounds of Bengal, an open-air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad.

Reflections on resurrecting medieval song.

On the sci-fi roots of modern fundamentalism.

Glenn Beck’s Mormon masterpiece theater.

Unearthing what two New Orleans brothers—a priest and a photographer—did with their spare time.

In which a half-Jew slaps some sensibility into would-be converters by encouraging worst-case scenarios.

What do the “preachers who are not believers” not believe?

What the schism over sexuality has to do with the colonial legacy in Africa.

Anne Hutchinson’s “No in Thunder.”

Grappling with James Agee’s punctuation, one hundred years after his birth.

The godly get good on climate change.

The disastrous politics of Rapture, in an excerpt from Patience with God.

Saint Hildegard and the science of religious experience.