Religion Dispatches
…ted the ranks of academic observers. Inadequate thinking about the idea of class, combined with class roles and assumptions that none could escape, resulted in analyses that reinforced existing socioeconomic hierarchies rather than interpreting them. In the final section he explores the constructive possibilities of his own model of class through historical analysis and ethnography. This work, like the whole book, is both very promising and somewh…
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…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I…
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…a senior citizen and take his middle. I have watched passengers with first class seats hand their tickets to uniformed veterans and sit in economy. Several times I have witnessed people move further back to allow a mother to sit next to her children. All of these required not only the hassle of moving, but also the discomfort of a worse seat. Sometimes the person with the better seat was asked, sometimes s/he offered. In most situations, the perso…
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…aw,” John Finnis. Two years later based on his dissertation he published a book about assisted suicide from the premises of natural law theory. When he repeatedly invoked the term “ordered liberty” in the majority opinion he wrote for Dobbs, Samuel Alito used natural law ideas and language that echoed many of the amicus briefs submitted to the Court by a broad range of conservative legal and policy organizations. Natural law has always been hiding…
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Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
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…racial categories (the “black church,” “Latino/a religion,” etc.). In this book, I make a case that class is equally important. Accepting this claim would mean thinking more deeply about across denominational lines. Second, the particular point is that the rise and fall of Congress-of-Industrial-Organizations-style unionism (in Detroit, at least) had a cultural analog in the rise and fall of specific expressions of working-class religion. Among th…
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…l source. It is too white, too Western and, tends to include only economic class, not race, in its power analysis. Cone’s theological sources are the bible and black experience. If one is going to argue against his theology, one must argue against these sources not Marx. So far, Beck has said nothing about black experience and nearly everything he has claimed about the bible has been untrue. His objection to the idea of collective salvation is no…
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…5,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet black families were prohibited from purchasing them. “Today those homes sell for $500,000 or $600,000,” Rothstein told me. “The result is that white working class families that moved to suburban communities with a federal subsidy 50 or 60 years ago have gained over the course of the last half-century $300,000 or $400,000 in equity.” White…
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…We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless in…
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…e success either. The opening weekend saw sales of more than $6 million in tickets. That’s the kind of number that will inspire others to try and figure out the formula for the faith-and-family blockbuster. Yet, with the cost of the film reportedly exceeding $30 million, it’s an open question whether or not the Left Behind reboot will get a second installment. The marketing problem of evangelical movies is still, stubbornly, a problem. The general…
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