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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… My working title for the book was “Trust and Obey.” That’s the name of an 1800s Presbyterian hymn that is frequently referenced by Quiverfull supporters that reads: “Trust and Obey, for there’s no other way/ to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.” The sentiment of the hymn really sums up the role of faith in this movement—ultimately, beyond the demographic dreams of Vision Forum and the Hesses, this movement relies on women having a faith s…
Read More…ound one-quarter of the electorate ever since 2000. According to Pew, that number will be a bit lower this time around: about 20%, by their estimate. White evangelicals are losing ground to non-white voters just like all whites, and to the religiously unaffiliated, just like all Christians. Those unaffiliated voters—the “Nones”—now rival white evangelicals in size. About two-thirds of them support Hillary Clinton, making them a solid Democratic co…
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…onomic luck. Instead, they are demographically much like the rest of White Americans, working class and middle class with a significant stratum of middle class professionals—professors, lawyers, chiropractors, etc.—as their leaders. And, these are not a string of disconnected organizations sharing only a common set of hatreds. Rather, this is a single movement, with a common set of leaders and interlocking memberships that hold a complete and some…
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…xperiments), she began to question the idea of devotion to a guru. After a number of attempts to leave, she broke free of the group at age twenty-five. I recently caught up with Tamm to talk about Sri Chinmoy’s death, her use of the word “cult,” and what her spiritual life looks like today. ** Did it make a difference to his followers that Sri Chinmoy was from India? Did it give him extra authority? In the late 1960s, there was a trend to look to…
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…nature in economics. Most of the rest of my argument builds on data point number 5, focusing on how religious studies (as if that’s a monolithic thing) to date has talked about the natural world. I share the below as someone who is at the core of my training a religionist who’s vested in using education to build a better, more sustainable society. I recognize that understanding the role of religion in society is of import as we work toward this g…
Read More…spond. Referring to the 1969 New York riots that became a milestone in the American gay rights movement, he said, “The church needs a Stonewall.” Hong Kong: Catholic Bishop Defends Cardinal, Compares Homosexuality to Drug Abuse Bishop Michael Yeung Ming-cheung of the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong, defending a political letter from Cardinal John Tong opposing marriage equality and anti-discrimination protections, compared gays to drug addicts, repo…
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…irector of the Office of Intellectual Freedom at the Chicago-headquartered American Library Association, told RD that the Project Blitz model bill “raises a lot of issues around the ability of individuals to access perfectly legal, constitutionally protected materials based on the values of one group in the community.” Contrary to Project Blitz disclaimers, in other words, this bill would allow conservative Christian values to determine what is le…
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…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…
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…so I discovered that the sociological data suggested that the majority of Americans believe in ghosts or demons. Indeed, a surprising 73% of Americans have at least one paranormal belief, and while the data is less robust it looks like there are similar belief patterns in Western Europe. At the very least, it seems hard to argue that the “modern West” is straightforwardly disenchanted. So I asked myself how did we get the notion that “modernity”…
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