Religion Dispatches
…rk. He began working as a curator in the 1930s, first at the University of Chicago (1933-1934), then took a lectureship at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York (1935-1940). He was then appointed as director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art at the end of the Second World War (1945-1946). It was in the aftermath of that apocalyptic period that Sweeney (and others) began to reflect more explicitly on art’s pot…
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…oices. In 2016, in the same month as the GOP convention, Blake Chastain, a Chicago-based writer and creator of the Exvangelical podcast, set out to create a platform and community for those who “have been hurt in God’s name.” An ex-evangelical from Indiana who attended Indiana Wesleyan University during George W. Bush’s presidency, Chastain conceived of the show in 2014, when, in his words, “through personal relationships and connections via Faceb…
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…yoga and gave his famous speech to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, which triggered the speaking tour that would take him all over the country, other Americans’ embrace of yoga was stirring plenty of conversation. Consider Pierre Bernard, a turn-of-the-century American social radical, sexual deviant, and early modern yogi. Bernard discovered yoga in his boyhood when he met an Indian yogi by the name of Sylvais Hamati in Li…
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…and a flirtation with a local Chabad house to a trek to the North Side of Chicago to worship with Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Finally, I rounded out my trip with a brief fling with Reconstructionist Judaism, but the soul of my darker self became dimmer and dimmer with each stop—became almost unrecognizable to me. Eventually I abandoned the key tenet of Hebrew Israelite belief: that Black people in America were the lost tribes of Israel destined t…
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…Insurgent opens with a brief lecture from the leader of a post-apocalyptic Chicago. Her face magnified by futuristic projectors, the dictatorial Jeanine (Kate Winslet) argues that her community must protect the social fabric at all costs. In this shattered world, a Harry Potter and Hunger Games mashup, everyone lives in one of five groups or “factions.” Each faction is devoted to a virtue—kindness, protection, fairness, intelligence, and selflessn…
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Dayspring Bible College and Seminary in suburban Chicago has filed a lawsuit against the Illinois Board of Higher Education challenging its accreditation law, which presently allows such Bible schools to issue “certificates and diplomas” but not “degrees.” Several other Illinois Bible schools have joined Dayspring’s suit, arguing that, according to Morgan Lee’s report in Christianity Today: the current ban financially hurts unaccredited Bible col…
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…llots. Devon Crawford, a 24 year-old divinity student at the University of Chicago, traveled home to vote against Moore because his version of Christianity “sanctifies the truth-making power of white men” and is “really just a masquerade for white supremacy.” Why should white men define the scope of what constitutes E/evangelicalism? Why do black Christians have to fight for equality and justice without the support of, and often in struggles again…
Read More…en I remember this election, I will remember the faces pressed together in Chicago’s Grant Park— young and old, black and white, famous (Oprah!) and utterly obscure. More personally, I will think about the young Middle Eastern stranger who hugged me when CNN called the election for Obama. In the middle of an Atlanta bar, he hugged me for probably five seconds before letting go. Normally, it would have been uncomfortable. Last night, it felt just a…
Read More…gossip. McCain went so far at one of his town hall meetings to grab a microphone from a woman who claimed that Obama was an Arab. The Texas numbers are unusual because most national polls show that just 5 to 10 percent of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim—less than half the number of Texans who buy into the debunked theories. “Y’know what,” I told my guitar teacher. “What?” he asked mid sip of his coffee. “I’d respect those people a lot mo…
Read More…religion by the Haitian government in 2003, has proven its capacity to persist. Sightings is a publication of The University of Chicago’s Martin Marty Center….
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