David Armstrong

I’m a Christian who hates convert stories. I hate the genre itself and the way it implicitly teaches its creators and audience to think about faith. Some of it is temperament. As someone trained in the scholarship of critical and comparative religion, specifically in biblical studies, and in Greco-Roman classics, the convert story bothers my sensibilities. It seems to me to rely on simplifications and demonization of the “Other,” whether that “Other” is “secularism,” another religion, or another form of Christianity…

Anime is an art form born out of the modern, postwar meeting between East and West in Japanese society. It drinks liberally from classical religious, mythological, and philosophical wellsprings, both indigenous to Asia–Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, and Shinto—and imported, particularly the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As a result, anime provides a unique[…..]