Religion Dispatches
…e with Christianity. And whether it’s Christians against non-Christians or Americans against non-Americans what it boils down to is, “you’re either with us or against us”—a strategy with nationalist dimensions. And sure enough, for Mohler and other evangelical opponents of yoga, part of the problem is that it comes from India. In discussing yoga’s roots in India, he characterizes it as “almost manically syncretistic.” Mohler warns that if that syn…
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…8 who is sold for sex is a victim of severe trafficking… if the girl is an American and of color, she will too often be arrested, charged with prostitution and jailed. Brave Young Women The degraded morality of black and Latina girls is not an abstract concept. Attitudes about sexually impure young women come ready-made from the conservative religious traditions most of my students have absorbed, whether it’s biblical fundamentalism or Catholic do…
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…ay. This time the specter of poverty is haunting us—the hardworking middle-class folks being wiped out by the financial meltdown, the foreclosure tsunami, confiscatory health care expenses, and a plummeting job market. Along with fear, there is real anger in middle-class suburbs about the crimes and betrayals of the best and the brightest who ran the casino economy from their well-appointed Wall Street aeries—ran it right into the ground, that is—…
Read More…wanted to know when they could start teaching kids creationism in science class. Board members asked a staff committee to research the possibility for the 2011-2012 school year. The discussion came up during a report on the pupil progression plan for the 2010-11 school year, delivered by Jan Benton, director of curriculum. Benton said that under provisions of the Science Education Act enacted last year by the Louisiana Legislature, schools can pr…
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…lesbians lobbied for civil rights and social acceptance. In 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association withdrew its classification of homosexuality as a “mental illness,” the change was widely reported as were the growing number of cities that added “sexual orientation” to anti-discrimination laws. By the end of the decade, reporters were filing profiles about a “hip” community with its own bars, clubs, music, and fashion as well as a distinc…
Read More…ight theses: A. a personality flaw B. a result of having been insulated by class privilege C. a result of developing his leadership style in an LDS institutional culture wherein leaders are expected to appear “flawless” and dissent and open disagreement is not sanctioned D. a consequence of a pragmatic-technocratic outlook that values incentives and outcomes over human processes (the New York Times calls it the “Mitt-bot” phenomenon) E. discomfort…
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…ch. It doesn’t take much to work that out. But where does the instinct for class warfare come from? I think Stoehr is right to frame his argument in religious terms: heavenly import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin. A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husban…
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…obin doesn’t say, but I will say, that the path to social democracy in the American context runs through American religion, not around it. Wesley Tang’s critique of neoliberalism’s twinned commitments to mass immigration and free trade also has social democracy in view. He points to the economic violence of the decades-long “meritocratic” project, which has concealed the immiseration of a white working class that “increasingly comes to resemble th…
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…new life. Because they remain connected to ethnic and religious streams of American life held by many mainline Protestants and American secularists in derision, they bring new life to traditions that are seemingly on their way to public extinction. In a word, progressive Christianity is in need of saviors. Their salvation may rest in the hands of the stereotypically primitive and cathartic world of non-white and non-mainline churches. Progressive…
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…gious switching to the Episcopal Church remains quite rare (0.7 percent of Americans have left a childhood religious group for the Anglican/Episcopal tradition), it is fairly common among evangelical writers and intellectuals. From the historian Randall Balmer and the author Ian Morgan Cron, to the poet Luci Shaw and even Bono of U2 — evangelicalism’s creative class is loaded with Anglicans.” This quest for wholeness leads her to the doors of St….
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