Religion Dispatches
…e a new narrative if you will. I once hoped to get it published by 1998 in time for the 30th anniversary of that great year, but the trade publishers found it too academic and the academic publishers found it too trade. I despaired several times that I would never climb out of that great canyon between them. But I kept going back to that itch. This is what I had to say, and I had to say it. What’s the most important message for readers? Too many m…
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…week’s meeting at Wheaton won’t accomplish much of anything. Well, that’s it for today’s installment of “Watch Evangelicals Desperately Squirm To Avoid Being Blamed For The Consistent Pattern Of Rigid Sexual Authoritarianism And Barely-Concealed Racism Of Their Community!” See you next time! Don’t worry readerinos, it won’t be long! Update 3/18: Indeed, looks like we’ll need another conference sooner rather than later. According to PRRI, Trump ha…
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…ble of doing. He pushed me harder than anyone else has ever pushed me. Sometimes, he pushed me too far. In those moments, he was no longer asking me to use my imagination, but instead insisting that I give him something specific that he wanted from me. It took me a long time to be able to distinguish between these quite different commands. I suspect that in the end, I disappointed him. He also disappointed me. Perhaps this disappointment was the g…
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…” However, each state had its own dynamic; in Montana, for example, at the time the state adopted its no-aid provision Catholic adherents outnumbered Protestants by a 3-to-1 margin, and several of the state’s leading public officials were Catholic. The situations in other states also varied widely. More broadly, the opinions in Espinoza raise questions about the Court’s use of history, particularly when it becomes a rule of constitutional law. His…
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…in late May 1948, writing: “The Lord will restore this kingdom in His own time. In the meantime, Israel is trying to restore herself. It is not God’s plan and not God’s time.” In an op-ed published on 19 October 1949 in Christian Century, Francis J. Bloodgood stressed the need for American Christians to support the cause of justice in Palestine: “It will be no good for us Western Christians to wash our hands and say that we will have nothing to d…
Read More…e blogging—I’ve got six weeks to finish my preparation for hajj. I’ll be blogging my way up to and then on through the hajj. So do return to this spot from time to time and see how that is going. Meanwhile, ‘Id Mubarak and many happy returns!…
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…rganizations with national networks have been able to raise funds for full-time employees to run their organization nationally, and on the local level lead their particular chapter in worship and doctrinal instruction. However, since at least the 1960s many of these student organizations, especially Hillel (Jewish), the (Catholic) Newman Center, and a number of evangelical interdenominational organizations (such as Intervarsity Christian Fellowshi…
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…t overtook social ethics in the 1970s is relevant to this point. The first time that I faced off with Neuhaus, he had recently converted to Catholicism; the last time, I had recently moved to Union. We disagreed about things precious to me—liberal theology, feminism, liberationist criticism, post-colonial theory, economic democracy—without failing to understand each other. But when I said that I took marginality for granted and my students at Unio…
Read More…le: although in his 900 years of life he hadn’t seen one, the universe sometimes does surprising and inexplicable things. And so that is what Rory’s presence there is presumed to be, even though he had been erased from time and space so as to never have existed. At this point, we are presented with one scientific approach to the seemingly miraculous: infinity. In an infinite universe, everything will happen sooner or later. And so the miraculous w…
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…ould be preserved through decades and centuries, with new commentators sometimes being added as successive copies were produced. Over time, the original contexts for these comments were forgotten and their relevance to the central text became obscure, so they became part of the interpretive project of reading a book. Often, the commentary became more significant than the central text itself. All of which is to say that there were a lot of “distrac…
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