Religion Dispatches
…should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship.” A growing number of mainline Protestants and evangelicals also support some form of legal recognition of same-sex relationships. This is especially true for Christians between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. There is often a wide gap between the pronouncements of religious leaders and the values held by individuals who have, in their own conscience, and in the context of shared…
Read More…n culture is “exceptional”—exceptional in its toxicity, that is. A growing number of truth telling historians are eager to help us discover these deeper roots if we are willing to listen. Here I’m thinking mainly of scholars like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Gerald Horne who focus on the connections between settler colonialism, white supremacy, and an unparalleled level of gun violence. To me the question that grows more acute daily is how to amplify…
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…eligion,” as something that you could then choose, reject, or petition for freedom of. The choice to constellate certain kinds of rituals, stories, propositions and epistemological modes into a single package called “religion” is a fairly recent, European, and Protestant phenomenon. Similarly, the idea that religiousness is separable from the rest of culture, in such a way that you can see it quantifiably motivating certain behaviors, would seem a…
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…ight to “govern our institution in accordance with our values and beliefs, free from government entanglement.” Between 2004 and 2014, Loyola Chicago tripled its number of contingent faculty, while tuition rose by 73 percent. However, even though the union passed at Loyola Chicago, theology faculty were blocked from joining by the NLRB, which made an exception because theology was seen to be directly involved in religious education (this exception…
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…of popular culture until the late twentieth century when it was tied to a number of social trends, including the rise of the 1960s British-American counterculture and the concomitant appeal of yoga’s South Asian roots, changes in global consumer culture toward a consumer-oriented approach to spirituality and wellness among bourgeois urban dwellers, and the continued Orientalist gaze that pictured yoga as the spiritual filler to a Western cultural…
Read More…al, leaving the American church with a massive money problem and shrinking numbers of parishioners on the eve of Pope Francis’ arrival. A recent study by Nicholas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Trugila in the Journal of Public Economics revealed that, unsurprisingly, “a scandal causes a persistent decline in the local Catholic affiliation and church attendance.” “Some Catholics join other religious denominations during the first three years after a scan…
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…s. In following the Ray story over the past few months, I am amazed at the number of non-Indian sweat lodge experts the media has been able to locate. Few Indians if any have been interviewed; and even decidedly liberal MSNBC featured Court TV anchor Ashleigh Banfield as their expert on the sweat lodge. Banfield’s expertise, admitted on air, was one sweat experience with her stepbrother or brother-in-law (she wasn’t sure how he was related), “step…
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…pus alone was assessed at $43 million, but trustees deemed its future as a free-standing institution unsustainable. Rich endowments can stave off the inevitable so long that, when closure comes, it feels sudden rather than inevitable. At the board meeting that determined Episcopal Divinity School’s fate, the (non-voting) student and faculty representatives entreated trustees for more time. This impulse is understandable, but the representatives we…
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…as on the verge of even larger sales—his forgery of an original “Oath of a Freeman,” if authenticated, would have sold for $1.5 million—but his vision exceeded his grasp, and soon creditors and dealers were hot on his trail. His promise to produce the “McLellin Papers,” documents from an early Mormon apostle who had left the faith, was supposed to be both a boon to his wallet and another strike against the church. But he struggled to produce a pro…
Read More…as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s expose…
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