Religion Remixed
Glamour and unattainability is out. Spiritual refreshment is in
By Tara Isabella Burton — August 23, 2019
(RNS) — Today’s advertisements are designed to evoke different and more numinous emotions: spiritual well-being, an inward journey, a moral sensibility. We’re buying the very things that organized religion used to provide us for free.
I’ll cry if I want to: Positive thinking, prosperity gospel and the vulnerability of faith
By Tara Isabella Burton — August 16, 2019
(RNS) — To be vulnerable, to be too much, feels like a failure in today's wellness culture. But we cannot positive-think our way out of the human condition.
Millennials, moral relativism and Iris Murdoch
By Tara Isabella Burton — July 19, 2019
(RNS) — The celebrated British novelist Iris Murdoch, who would have turned 100 this week, anticipated young Americans' attempt to find goodness without God.
In Brooklyn, ‘tradpunk’ Christianity meets millennial counterculture
By Tara Isabella Burton — July 12, 2019
(RNS) — For many religious people, faith has become a countercultural rejection of elements of secular culture. It’s traditionalism as transgression. You might even call it tradpunk.
Democratic candidates are hiring faith outreach directors — but outreach for whom?
By Tara Isabella Burton — July 1, 2019
(RNS) — Ultimately, the best work of campaign faith engagement strategists might not be in changing minds but in getting out the existing Democratic vote.
How a Catholic bishop and Jordan Peterson became fellow travelers
By Tara Isabella Burton — June 21, 2019
(RNS) — Peterson and his 'new atavists' share with their Catholic brethren a disillusionment with what they see as the feminization of contemporary, post-feminist, post-sexual-revolution America.
There’s more to wellness than looking pretty
By Tara Isabella Burton — June 14, 2019
(RNS) — Wellness culture is about more than beauty. It’s about something even more complicated: purity.
Can witches and consumer culture coexist?
By Tara Isabella Burton — June 4, 2019
(RNS) — As long as millennials adapt rituals and spells as a force for change, companies will hawk those rituals and spells to preserve the status quo.
Getting in on — and tossed out of — the Satanist Temple joke
By Tara Isabella Burton — May 24, 2019
(RNS) — As more and more millennials identify with spiritual or philosophical movements outside the bounds of 'traditional' religions, how will these groups police their ideology while remaining inclusive?
How ‘joke religion’ turns deadly serious when the online alt-right comes to life
By Tara Isabella Burton — May 14, 2019
(RNS) — The nihilism of today's alt-right is both a religion and a rejection of the transcendence that religion holds out as a balm.
Reinventing religion, millennials rewrite the rules of relationships
By Tara Isabella Burton — May 2, 2019
(RNS) — Creating bespoke religious traditions as they are, it makes sense that millennials would also create bespoke relationship models.
How the ‘Harry Potter’ books are replacing the Bible as millennials’ foundational text
By Tara Isabella Burton — April 25, 2019
(RNS) — Engagement with the Potter texts online brought millions to the World Wide Web, which in turn has indelibly shaped our approach to self and belief.
How psychics, suddenly everywhere, are healing the world
By Tara Isabella Burton — April 11, 2019
(RNS) — This year's equivalent of 'yoni' eggs, psychics — pardon me, 'intuitive healers' — are more than the latest trend in wellness culture; they are redeeming human feeling as a basic truth.
The real reason div students need to hear Jordan Peterson’s canceled lectures
By Tara Isabella Burton — April 2, 2019
(RNS) — Peterson, who applies psychology to biblical studies, is as much a product of the 'unmooring' from Western values that he decries as he is a bulwark against it.
How fan fiction gave millennials power over their spirituality
By Tara Isabella Burton — March 22, 2019
(RNS) — The internet has transformed our consumption of texts — even sacred texts — into malleable pieces that can be reimagined, reinvented and owned in a new way.
Tara Isabella Burton
Religion Remixed
Burton, who received a doctorate in theology from Oxford University, is at work on a book about the rise of the religiously unaffiliated in America, to be published in November 2020 by Public Affairs. Her novel, “Social Creature,” was published in June 2018.
