Religion Dispatches
When asked to write about McCain’s religion I thought I’d review the alignment between the American military and American religions. What I found is as much about what the American public needs to hear about religion as it was about what McCain felt or thought about religion.
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What inspired you to write Consuming Religion? Restlessness. After I finished my first book, I…
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Why didn’t Mitt Romney provide an account of himself that reckoned with the very things we find so uncanny about him, namely his unmitigated embrace of capital, procreation, and country clubs?
Read MoreCarlin needed a God, wanted a God, but how could the Almighty be all-powerful if “everything he ever makes… dies”?
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Was Michael Jackson a supernatural magician or an icon of self-immolation? Both? The physical body is gone, the musical productivity has ceased, the capacity to speak for himself is no more, so now MJ is a wonderfully ambiguous figment of our imagination. Three religion scholars discuss the life, legend, meaning, and myth of one of the world’s most talented, successful, and perhaps tortured performers.
Read MoreThe Rev. Wright controversy begs the question: Has “The Black Church” outgrown its usefulness?
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The New York Times Wedding/Celebration pages are pure periodical porn, invoking a cascade of genealogies and an overabundance of fortune. Religion is a whispered aside; and what of love?
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While the history of popularization is a history of regular folk learning about other regular revolutionizing folk and imitating them, comic book histories like The Wordy Shipmates do their part in ensuring that the next generation knows more about Beyoncé than Byzantium.
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John Travolta’s 16-year-old son is found dead and our celebrity culture is quick to blame the religion of his parents, Scientology. So much harder to face the fact of death, to look beyond the spectacle of someone else’s tragedy and toward our own frailty and error.
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The president’s faith, according to John McCain, is “[the] number one issue.” Having scoured the public record, the author reports back with a startling proposal: John McCain may not believe in God.
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