The Flying Saucer and the Quest

What can two new books about UFOs and extraterrestrial belief tell us about religion—and the limits of what we think is possible?
By Jeffrey J. Kripal

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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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Eminent Americans

Eminent Americans is a weekly podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it.

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Your Slogans Do Me No Favors

By Carlene Bauer
Last fall, I received an email from Planned Parenthood of Greater New York. The subject line read “Your Stories Have Power,” and inside it thanked those who had spoken out in support of the organization when Trump’s spending bill defunded it. Sharing your story, it said, “takes power away from our opponents to make up their own false realities about what it means to destroy access to reproductive and sexual health care.”  I haven’t ever received care from Planned Parenthood, but five years ago, at the age of 48, I sought an abortion. At a women’s health center where a…

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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.