Religion Dispatches
…against Goldman will finally expose the extent of self-dealing involved in today’s financial marketplace, but it’s possible. And maybe they will also start to expose the extent to which corrupted markets and corrupted government are intertwined problems. That seems less likely, but it is still devoutly to be wished for. When the president went to New York last week to beard the bankers in their den, as it were, I was moved to wonder whether this t…
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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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…er Rain, or the NAR and includes one of the most significant figures in American Pentecostalism: Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944) and her Los Angeles megachurch, Angelus Temple. “Sister Aimee” began her ministry through traveling revivals during which she claimed to heal people of their illnesses through the Holy Spirit. She became one of the most influential people in the country during the public years of her ministry, and when Angelus Temple…
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…e. 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 pro-Israel? Can Israel be a state where Jews have autono…
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…of sense of the term.” The redemptive power of ideas For the most part, Americans today consume public speaking through three avenues: politics, the classroom, and the pulpit. Of these three, a good TED talk resembles nothing so much as a sermon. “The speakers seem fevered, possessed, Pentecostal,” tech critic Virginia Heffernan wrote in the New York Times Magazine back in 2009. “A great TED talk is reminiscent of a tent revival sermon,” Megan Hus…
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…ew President will be inaugurated in eight years, in 2017. By that time, America will look quite different religiously from the way it looks today, and our public expression of religion may have come to reflect that change. The Christian prayer I am referring to at the inauguration was that of Rev. Rick Warren, the best-selling author and conservative pastor. Warren ended his invocation prayer “in the name of the one who changed my life,” Jesus—rep…
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…ve done much to enable the minority authoritarianism that now threatens American democracy. However much today’s anti-Trump evangelicals accomplish, their writings advance with increasing frequency a liberal-pluralist version of the faith that was long espoused by the hated ecumenicals. This dynamic of appropriation and effacement suggests that the old Protestant Establishment, for all its limitations, got a few things right. When secularists and…
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…oundation for theological reflection. According to a November report in America magazine, Pope Francis is already considering removing the “warning” attached to Teilhard’s historical writings, and more recently the National Catholic Reporter reported on an online movement to name him a “doctor of the Church.” Recent scholarly research, however, should cast doubt upon any such movements, as Teilhard’s positive influence may not be able to overcome…
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…ween 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 Holocaust memory. Jewish ideas have lost their clarity. Second, he shows that there are resources for harmonizing Jewish identity and worl…
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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