Religion Dispatches
…rs for a bail-out of our free-falling credit markets. The subtext of story number one, which will likely become story number two in the next day or so, is the partisan sniping that has already consumed the issue. A conservative core of House Republicans now claim, with a semi-straight face, that a partisan floor speech from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually turned them against a bill they came prepared to vote for. The speech “was” partisan—in t…
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…at individuals who come out to family members, specifically as an atheist… report that families often react with anger and rejection, as communication deteriorates and distrust grows. For those who grow up in authoritarian or fundamentalist Christian families, the difficult questions can’t be answered by checking a box on a survey, which is likely why RD contributor Chrissy Stroop and journalist Lauren O’Neal decided to compile an anthology of ess…
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…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…
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…d, “You feel something else. You just feel yourself.” Participants tell us repeatedly that no one judges anyone else during these sessions. Off to the side of the crowd, sitting against a tree, sits Laura Beth Circy, the only person whom we will see in our four days here reading a Bible. Circy has come to Bonnaroo with a friend working in one of the booths, and she describes herself as someone familiar with the excesses of the festival circuit. “I…
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…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…
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…book examines American culture’s preoccupation with body improvement, the dominant fantasies of physical perfection that orient the quest for improvement, the traditional religious and philosophical narratives that are tacitly embedded in this quest, and the shame many people experience as a byproduct of their particular body’s refusal to live up to the normative ideal. (Notice my preference for the word refusal—instead of failure—in the previous…
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…umbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it…
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…ad vanished. So I began to ask: how did this narrative of modernity become dominant? Put differently, how did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? And that was what I set out to answer in The Myth of Disenchantment. “Higher education levels do not directly result in disenchantment. Indeed, one might hazard the guess that education allows one to maintain more cognitive dissonance rather than less…
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…assionate religion at its heart was able, eventually, to give us total freedom of religion, including freedom from religion for those whom we might well regard as the ultimate Dissenters. Application to this year’s Independence Day commemoration: No, in July of 2014 we don’t face the urgent threat of an established church, but we do face an ongoing and brutal struggle with those who treat freedom of religion as the opportunity to impose their reli…
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…ity. The U.S. Commission on International Freedom released its 2017 annual report. It was the first report in which Russia was classified as a “country of particular concern,” defined as a country whose governments engage in or tolerate “particularly severe religious freedom violations that are systemic, ongoing, and egregious.” So far, Putin’s increasing suppression of non-Orthodox religions has not noticeably dimmed the enthusiasm with which U.S…
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