Ed Simon is an editor for Berfrois and a staff writer for The Millions. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion is available from Zero Books.
A reluctant Indian militant, a Jew with Christmas envy, and a feminist in search of an alternative Thanksgiving are among the scholars and writers who have weighed in over the years on our secular religious national holiday of Thanksgiving.
For all that Bloom got wrong about theory and the state of the discipline, he was correct in his contention that the sometimes godlessness of the field was a critical detriment, and that 'A nation obsessed with religion rather desperately needs a religious criticism.'
Morrison’s witness to language’s power to both destroy and create has been on ample display in our current season of American blood-letting. In 1993 Morrison warned of “Tongue-suicide,” which is “common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is … human.”
There are certain theological implications to the black hole. Not that it confirms any literal or conventional belief in a deity. God need not be real for divinity to be an applicable concept, for it’s good enough that the black hole is real.
Thanksgiving has been marshaled in the battle over what is the proper interpretation of the idea of America. With thousands of refugees looking for amnesty in that “last, best hope of earth,” will the better angels of our nature find room for them at the table?
The deadly "dance plague" of 1518 took place in a rapidly changing world where suddenly old verities were in question and a new media brought all manner of unconfirmed, superstitious ideas. Sound familiar?
Inherit the Wind's creationist protesters may have held signs reading “I’m not descended from a monkey,” but the reality is that apes permeate our myths, religion, and literature precisely because it's so obvious we’re related. Darwin may have provided the mechanism, but our own eyes tell us that there's something eerily human in the eyes of our closest simian ancestors.
![[Photo: Koko the talking gorilla]](https://rewirenewsgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Koko-800x533.png)