Religion Archives - Public Seminar

History

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

A reminder of a sacred myth

October 7, 2025 • by Manousha Dhiwaghar

Judah Magnes, rabbi, orator, pacifist, and founding Chancellor of the Hebrew University, has long haunted the political margins of Israeli and Palestinian history. Too Zionist for the anti-statist left, too pacifist for the militarizing Yishuv, and too binational for a nation determined to consolidate, Magnes occupies a strange position in ...

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

Capitalism

Peter Thiel and the Decline of the West

The last priest of a dead faith

September 24, 2025 • by Ahmed Bouzid

In the twilight of the secular Western project, as its elites scramble for a vision to forestall cultural entropy, Peter Thiel has emerged as one of its most articulate and celebrated prophets. In a remarkably candid interview with The New York Times, Thiel laments the stagnation of modern life—not just ...

North America

The New Political Theology

Disestablishing the Establishment Clause

September 24, 2025 • by Arthur Goldhammer

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Strictly ...

Education

The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

On evangelical anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party

August 28, 2025 • by David A. Hollinger

For the first time in American history, a major political party has a vested interest in a low-education electorate. This astonishing fact has inspired remarkably little discussion. Religion has a lot do with it. The Republican Party courted evangelical Protestants for decades, but the client eventually captured the patron. The party ...

The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

Music

God Bless Perverts

The new Ethel Cain album is sexually, romantically, spiritually sick

June 4, 2025 • by Mikayla Emerson

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album ...

Literature

Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime

In the 2025 William Phillips Lecture, Salman Rushdie discusses freedom, defiance, fame, and the lesson of the ham sandwich

April 15, 2025 • by Luis Jaramillo and Salman Rushdie

In March, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie visited The New School to deliver the 2025 William Phillips Lecture, a talk titled “Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime.” Rushdie, the author of 15 novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, and nonfiction books including, most recently, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, ...

North America

Elon Musk’s Cruel Moral Sentiments

What the world’s richest man has yet to learn from his study of the Bible

April 3, 2025 • by David Lay Williams

Elon Musk may or may not be “the world’s richest man” these days, depending on the wildly fluctuating value of his Tesla car company, a target for those protesting Musk’s “move fast, break stuff” approach to downsizing the federal bureaucracy through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk’s savage cuts ...

Middle East & North Africa

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

March 3, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that ...

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

Gender

The Blessings of K-Pop

What could be more divine than a real human who inspires and comforts without ever having to meet you?

January 23, 2025 • by Abha Deshmukh

As a child, I engaged in religious rituals out of obligation. Over time, the black thread tied around my ankle came off, the excitement of choosing a clay Ganesh and decorating its shrine slowly dulled, the prayers that I had spent hundreds of hours memorizing evaporated from my memory, and ...

Feminism

Christine de Pizan and Women’s Tongues

Why do women bleed milk?

November 25, 2024 • by Chiara Bottici

I am doing it again. Teaching Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. As I always do, I asked at the beginning of class who knew the work before our “Philosophy and Literature” class. This time, a positive surprise! One student had been introduced to de Pizan’s ...

Europe & Central Asia

Putin and Patriarch Kirill’s Promise of Universal Liberation

Why some young men in America are converting to Orthodox Christianity

April 10, 2024 • by Katherine Kelaidis

Vladimir Putin is on track to be the longest reigning Russian leader since Catherine the Great. The two resilient despots have more in common than one might imagine. ...

Putin and Patriarch Kirill’s Promise of Universal Liberation

Higher Ed

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

October 12, 2022 • by John D’Emilio

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...