Religion Dispatches
…10,000 angels, instead He died alone for you and me.” He could have called 10,000 angels, but instead he called 10,000 religion scholars. (And let’s not start a Twelve Days of Christmas cascading laundry list here, or this essay will never end.) The numbers tell the story. The academic study of religion has become an industry. So has the church. No matter how badly clergy want their lives to be “a calling,” they are actually jobs for which they a…
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…in-punishing, prayer-answering, activist God who has a personal agenda and numbers every hair on our heads. But, as Dawkins observes repeatedly, this is precisely the form of religion embraced by millions and millions of ordinary people worldwide. By ignoring that fact, Gould was changing the subject, and so is Wood. Third, Wood scolds the New Atheists for failing to appreciate the fact that there are “millions of people whose form of religion is…
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…iversity and the State University of New York at Buffalo, culminated in his 1981 appointment as the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and civilization at Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1995. Yet Girard always was a controversial figure, in large part because his major contributions to thought—a theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism—were offered in the style of grand theory an…
Read More…s right is now getting just about the degree of political victory that its numbers and political power justify. We’re all pretty even now. The rapid rise and even more rapid fall of Huckabee is the biggest non-story (i.e., story gone MIA in the MSM) of the campaign season so far. True, from the MSM standpoint there were all sorts of reasons that Huckabee should not have been taken seriously as a candidate for president. But the Iowa Republicans su…
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…e can cite George Washington’s letter to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in 1791. But this is standard Zionist fare. In 1971 David Ben Gurion came to the U.S. and gave a speech to American Jews, in English, telling them that if antisemitism doesn’t get them, assimilation will. He even mentioned Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe and said, “I am not sure his grandchildren will be Jewish.” The Satmar rebbe didn’t have grandchildren as his daughters t…
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…ncreasingly clear that Jack has sacrificed his soul for the nation’s good. Spiritually empty, he’s ready to die after exposing himself to a lethal bioweapon. Nearing the end, he asks a Muslim cleric for forgiveness, a deathbed confession that moved some viewers, but left others apoplectic. (Online chatter continues as to whether or not Jack converted.) In its own bludgeony way, 24 substantiates the torture/terror debate better than the news media…
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…e are cosmic wars, in that they touch on a transcendent sense of moral and spiritual struggle. They’re often therefore imbued with religious significance. Most of the terrorist acts that I’ve studied are products of these cosmic wars. When I interviewed one of the jihadi activists associated with al Qaeda who was involved in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center he told me that he wasn’t a terrorist, but a soldier. Though I didn’t recognize th…
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…Who Disagreed With Me”). According to star Kevin Sorbo, the DVD of God’s Not Dead will have an interactive feature referencing 37 real-life court cases of universities battling Christian students. Can’t wait for that one. Via Buzzfeed’s Adam B. Vary, here’s a chart of Biblical movie box office numbers. “Biblical movie” is liberally defined here, but it’s interesting to note the difference between now and the “golden age” of Biblical epics (1949-19…
Read More…this story for me. I wrote a book back in 2008 called Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians. It was published by big-name publishing house (Jossey-Bass) and won high praise from Publisher’s Weekly before its release. When it came out, it got little attention from any mainstream press. Any touring I did in support of the book I created on my own, reaching out as best I could to interested parties. CNN never ca…
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…ims that Mormonism makes (angels delivering golden plates to a boy in early 19th-century upstate New York, modern-day prophets and everyday saints receiving revelations from Heavenly Father) requires that Mormon believers occupy a rich and imaginatively demanding spiritual world. But even in this “jungle of belief,” Mormons don’t think on a daily basis about the theology behind their sacred underwear. They don’t pine for their own planets. Such ob…
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