Religion Dispatches
…tinctly unhelpful. So to be specific, Crouch says this: We at Christianity Today believe Christians are absolutely free to use marijuana (where legalized). And, when it comes to pot in our particular cultural context, we think it would be foolish to use that freedom. For the CT editors, the moral quality of marijuana use seems to depend entirely upon the “cultural context” in which it occurs. And since our particular context is not conducive to ma…
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…was not at all good. The Jews who first conceived of heaven as we know it today were under assault, literally, from their Greek rulers. Christians, at the beginning, were a marginal band, derided by the pagan majority. Islam was established in a uniquely inhospitable part of the world by people who hoped to rectify the social order: to turn the “have nots” into “haves.” For all these groups, heaven—a very specific heaven—was a reward for staying…
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…ervescence,” could lead individuals to act with emotional abandon, what we today might call extremism. To threaten the totem, particularly in front of large groups (such as on national television!), is to call into question the foundations of society. “When a belief is shared unanimously by a people, to touch it—that is, to deny or question it—is forbidden,” Durkheim wrote. People kill or die for their symbols: The soldier who dies for his flag di…
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…ess to divorce and suffrage. While the stakes are not exactly the same for today’s debates over polygamy, there’s quite a bit of rhetorical and political continuity between the nineteenth-century anti-polygamy cause and today’s. Claims that same-sex marriage and polygamy are social experiments that will adversely affect children serve to limit women’s (and other people’s) options. Sheff discovered, for instance, that triads with one woman and two…
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…ness and diversity of our tradition. Faced with the revelation that 73% of today’s American Jews regard remembering the Shoah as a lynchpin of their Judaism, I see educational and spiritual opportunity knocking. That three in every minyan don’t identify with a particular denomination intrigues me. Given today’s three transdenominational seminaries (ALEPH, AJR, and Hebrew College) I suspect that percentage may grow in years to come. For me that’s a…
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…to be held accountable for their racism. Too many people are hearing this coded rhetoric and deciding that the real problem with the economy must be folks of color, immigrants, and the Jews.” During the last period of Patriot and militia growth in the mid-1990s, Ward witnessed this coded racist rhetoric being tested in the margins of the right-wing media, though it has since moved into the mainstream. In the past year I’ve interviewed dozens of a…
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…on Lady Gaga’s (non)religion can thus be summed up in Baudrillard’s words: today, we have moved from a theology of truth and secrecy… [into] an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection. Lady Gaga is nothing other than an artificial resurrection. Like the ostensibly esoteric symbols that are so prevalent in…
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…on titled “About Pennsylvania Pastors Network,” the group points out “that today our society is struggling morally and spiritually [and there is a] constant battle—the family’s fight for its soul. The attack on our culture is imminent, and the truth is: We can stop it. As clergy, you hold the hearts of the people in your hands, and when people need someone to turn to for answers, you are there. We want to help equip you with the information and re…
Read More…ss of pretense. Our old friend self-deception But the hypocrisy we witness today may not be so much acts of pretense and public false performance as self-deception. In Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations, Béla Szabados and Eldon Soifer suggest that our perception of hypocrisy has shifted in modern times. If Biblical and Medieval thinkers saw hypocrisy primarily as a matter of pretense, of the difference between the inner morality and outward perform…
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…le-bound religion of his contemporaries, was a kind of teaching in itself. Today, when the Sermon on the Mount has long since left the summit for the sermon pulpit, we are apt to forget what Jesus and his disciples would have understood implicitly: that location is everything. A sermon like that, which teaches us to love our enemies and treat our neighbors as ourselves, just doesn’t make sense under any roof but the sky. But now so much has change…
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