The Beautiful Game’s Crisis of Faith

Soccer has become more global, more Muslim, and more open. But FIFA’s embrace of Qatar and Saudi Arabia has corrupted the game’s new pluralism.
By Dan Friedman

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Podcast

Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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Against Climate Grief

By Susannah Crockford
This civilization is finished—that was the statement that made me start researching climate change. It was 2017, and I was in a pavilion-style tent in the back garden of the Panacea Society Museum, in southeast England. The society was formed after the last member of a millenarian group called the Southcottians died. The group were the followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott, who in the late eighteenth century predicted the end of the world, and her own role as the mother of the messiah. Her expected birth turned out to be the cancer that killed her, and the group lasted…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.