Religion Dispatches
…ycoons—the Ones with the Diamond Stickpins Let me say a bit more about why today’s smooth operators are more loathsome than the tycoons of old. T.J. Stiles’ prizewinning new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt shows the old reprobate to have been driven, ruthless, and sometimes brutal in pursuit of what he wanted. But always mindful of time and chance and never pretending to be of a superior species than the people he outwitted and exploited. It is…
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…faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.” It’s not surprising, then, that the American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp said in a statement this afternoon,”Today’s opinion creates the Church of the Supreme Court, with President Obama serving as its High Priest.” That’s undoubtedly only the beginning of the overheated rhetoric to come. The majority opinion, though, gamed out all these arguments. “Man…
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…the Bible). This approach to race is known as two-seed theory, and it was promoted by none other than William Branham, the Latter Rain leader. In fact, Branham was ordained into ministry by Roy Davis, the National Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Today’s NAR leaders seem untroubled by Branham’s associations with White supremacism and laud him as an early prophet of their movement. One former elder at Bethel Church, a NAR powerhouse in Redding…
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…wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance of the far right in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet ironically, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed” now rules the state of Israel. Hartman may not be able to change that reality, so he wants to change the story. Is it possible, today, for one to not be a Zionist and still be p…
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…but what we have here, mostly, is a particular aesthetic (“The TED talk is today a sentimental form,” Nathan Heller writes in The New Yorker). Wright describes this aesthetic in frankly spiritual terms. TED talks, he told me, are in keeping with “a kind of civic religion of aspiration and self-reliance and communal progress.” When I brought up this hope-and-progress energy with Vanderbilt historian Paul Stob, a scholar of intellectual culture, he…
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…ectarian and the rabbi complied. The prayers were addressed to “God of the Free, Hope of the Brave” and basically gave thanks. Though obviously addressed to God, the prayers were pitched to minimize anyone’s discomfort. Of course, even nonsectarian prayer contradicts the secular paradigm of government neutrality toward religion and the wall of separation. But as we saw at the inauguration, the courts are not going to enforce that secular paradigm….
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…ee other causes. First, the birth rate declined rapidly as the ecumenicals promoted contraception and encouraged the entry of women into the workforce. Evangelical parents had scads of children, more even than Catholic parents during the baby boom and the decades following. Second, and yet more important, millions of young people left their parents’s church, having become involved in secular communities promoted by the social movements of the 1960…
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…d only truly became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and is known today as one of the most influential Catholic theologians with regards to evolution in the second half of the 20thcentury. To chart this influence, one need only note Teilhard’s citations by the three most recent Popes. In 2003, Pope Saint John Paul II echoed Teilhard’s vision of a cosmic Eucharist in the encyclical Ecclesia Eucharista: Because even when it is celebrated on…
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…emporary world? Those who want to ground Jewish identity in the reality of today’s antisemitism abroad must deal with the disconnect between that antisemitism and the reality of Jews who are truly at home in America today. Even the contemporary memorialization of the Holocaust rests on a strange rhetorical simultaneity of the uniqueness of Jewish victimization alongside a universalism implicit in the commitment to human rights that flows out of Ho…
Read More…of the Southern Baptist Convention). I doubt very much that any Christian today would consider slavery a “live issue”, but it was not always so. What many today may not be aware of is that the supporters of slavery had in their favor those specific texts in the Bible that address the subject. They engaged in careful exegesis of the passages, which offered legislation regarding the practice rather than prohibiting it. Turning to the New Testament,…
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