Religion Dispatches
…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….
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…d Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA. In the aftermath of the attack, a number of Republican presidential candidates and elected officials issued tweets that, many have argued ad nauseum, demonstrated a commitment to public piety instead of public policy as a response to the massacre. In a rare moment, news and social media outlets in the U.S. became a forum for a surprising debate about spiritual disciplines—the meaning and import of prayer. L…
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…the modern concept of Hell is a post-biblical conflation of motifs from a number of sometimes conflicting biblical and apocryphal notions of sheol, gehenna, Hades, judgment in the end-times, etc. More starkly anachronistic are claims that Jesus taught parables about the “free market” (a late-medieval concept at best), and that the Bible includes “later-inserted liberal passages.” In describing the project, Schlafly has repeatedly cited two such “…
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…Judaism has to heresy,” then for most of Jewish history it may have been closer to the opposite. For 2000 years Jewish prayer has hoped ardently that the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) would soon be redeemed by God and led by His Messiah; some even made pilgrimage to visit or dwell with others in the Holy Land. But there is surprisingly little evidence that Jews also always longed for a sovereign State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael) or to be a Middl…
Read More…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…
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…verely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial claim. When one user pointed out that Je…
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…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…
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…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…
Read More…other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married. Yet the chu…
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…ons. I don’t mean a simplistic parity (e.g., giving each religion an equal number of words or lines). Religious balance instead means presenting each religious tradition as fairly and accurately as possible. While that might seem an obvious good to most RD readers, the textbook review process also taught me that entrenched, politically powerful, and well-organized forces in Texas and beyond are working to undermine that kind of religious balance i…
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