Religion Dispatches
…lism to Post-Christian Culture, the Sheffield Centre, Children’s Sunday school attendance, for instance, has drastically plunged over the past century, dropping from 80 percent at the start of the century to 12 percent. In an article I penned for Yale Divinity School’s Reflections magazine, I observed that explorations of alternative worship/emerging church culture have been transpiring over in the UK for decades. In 2004, the Church of England re…
Read More…ill take time to explain. Presidents very rarely do this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it only once—to declare war on Japan. Lyndon Johnson did so, after the assassination of President Kennedy. George W. Bush did so, after the 9/11 attacks. And perhaps most tellingly, Bill Clinton did so to speak about health care reform. It was not an auspicious setting for an intractable public debate. On the one hand, President Obama runs the genuine risk of m…
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…tican as canon law for U.S. dioceses). The Charter called for dioceses to cooperate with civil authorities and comply with reporting laws, to permanently remove abuser-priests from ministry, and to establish majority-lay review boards to look at allegations against clergy and advise bishops whether to suspend the accused. The bishops also required priests, deacons, diocesan employees, volunteers, and children in education programs to undergo “safe…
Read More…sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rituals, sacred texts, and physical spaces that all serve to bind the participants together. Atheism has none of these things—most of the time it’s an individual choice, made and kept alone. In my piece, I point out how even Democrats still resort to appeals to faith, but: The reli…
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…ted, and delineated through commemorative concerts, academic conferences, books, box sets, and a feature-length documentary film. A special series on religion and culture produced in collaboration with the Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California This new body of scholarly literature and pop cultural production reveals the Grateful Dead as a uniquely American phenomenon with an extraordinary American legacy. Indeed, as the…
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…k offering prayerful presence and witness when neo-Nazis, fascists, and unhooded Ku Klux Klan members descended on the intersection, unleashing violence that caused the security detail protecting Blackmon and Henderson-Espinoza to literally yank Rev. Blackmon off-camera during a live interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid. (Video from that segment can be found below.) Just a few hours later and only blocks from where Blackmon and Henderson-Espinoza had b…
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…only in Arab culture, but in Muslim cultures more generally. The shoe as tool of discipline is quite a common trope in Islamicate literatures. Salman Rushdie has used the idea of children being disciplined by champal (flip-flops) to great comedic effect. Iranian films also use it for humor, because the truth is funny. It is relatively well-known that when you enter a Muslim house of prayer, you must remove your shoes. What may not be generally kn…
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…cently “scholars have abandoned the term Celtic Church believing it to be too closely associated with inaccurate ideas.” However, as her study makes clear, the general public is in no way allergic to this constructed history given that a “quick search of the internet produces an abundance of links to Celtic spirituality seminars, sites detailing the ‘history’ of the Celtic Church and Celtic Christian denominations.” Among many in the general publi…
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…called a punishment from God for Satanism—the same episode that Chrissy Stroop ranked as number one on her own top 10 list, and a worthy contender, no doubt! But since Robertson liked to say outrageous things like this on a regular basis, I created a list more attuned to underlying structural aspects of his resume: less about preposterous provocations and more about his work as a cog in the everyday banality of evil in the Republican coalition. It…
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