Religion Dispatches
…ince Jesus himself said we won’t know the date or the time of his return. Evans is prepared with his answer to me and others who laugh off their efforts: “Sadly, only eight people survived the flood in Noah’s time,” he said. “The number of people that are going to be saved is going to be very small.” All this rapture talk reminds me of a morning I spent in the chair at my hair salon. My hairdresser had been reading Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series….
Read More…d still more resources into the fight—ultimately paying a relatively small number of strikers the then-unheard-of sum of $12 million in union strike benefits. The union had won an overwhelming victory. But within a decade Kohler was shipping the work to new non-union facilities in the South. Just last year the current magnate—yet another Herbert Kohler—pushed through a greatly weakened contract for the small number of Local 833 members still emplo…
Read More…d several years, made themselves something of a home, and even converted a number of the Waorani. The evangelical conversation about Elliot and the five who died before her evoked their commitment to God—though the language of “adventure” was woven through this rhetoric. In the Victorian culture of the nineteenth century, a movement arose called “muscular Christianity,” which involved evangelism through sport programs, but also celebrated a certai…
Read More…nt, compared to 37% of Gen Xers and 50% of the Silent Generation. Though a number of studies have found that young people were leaving the church because they saw them as intolerant places, it’s unlikely that the conservative religious actors behind the anti-gay rights law that just passed in Mississippi and the Hobby Lobby case realize that their actions are part of—and perhaps a causal source—of this growing disenchantment. While the consequence…
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…a myth. The term “modernity” is itself vague. There can, occasionally, be value in vagueness, but “modernity” here rests on an extraordinarily elastic temporality that can be extended heterogeneously and in value-laden ways to different regions and periods more or less at the whim of the theorist . It can also pick out or highlight different processes such as urbanization, industrialization, globalization or capitalism—but these are indistinct an…
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…gy, not Christianity.” As Mendies sees it,the priorities of old-fashioned evangelism—where a premium was placed on the number of souls that were “saved”—have been supplanted in recent years by those of the social gospel, in which Christian ethics are applied to societal issues such as poverty, violence, preventable disease, ecological concerns, gender issues, and human rights. “More and more you are beginning to see people seeing the social aspect…
Read More…it was pretty minimal damage and if not for the propriety of my sisters in various states of undress, I would have loved to take a photo. Next time when it’s empty, I’ll do that. Empty? Imagine that. Okay, so I made my way out and retraced my steps back to my spot. Well, at least that is what I needed to do—but this is where those instructions on how to keep yourself sane would have been useful. Try to place yourself somewhere and note with marker…
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…and to have their behavior heavily regulated. Though codes of conduct may vary, evangelical universities like ORU, Liberty University, and Regent University all prohibit students from using illegal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, wearing provocative clothing, and engaging in premarital and homosexual sex. Bob Jones University actually prohibited interracial dating up until 2001. Oral Roberts believed that the survival of his own namesake university…
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…eople like Blanchard and me who can recognize both the good and the bad in various religious traditions. Yet they insist that I, and others like me, who doubt the existence of God or gods, am in fact an atheist by definition. Thus, they argue that, while atheism and heresy may refer to two different things—lack of belief in god and an outsider-insider relationship to the Christian tradition, respectively—heretics should be more willing to own up t…
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…the necessary inconvenience of wearing face masks until there was a viable vaccine. Wearing face masks to prevent catching Covid, before there was a viable vaccine, was widely seen as commonsense. Commonsense, however, is not politically neutral when you believe the Republicans are good, because they are good, and the Democrats are bad, because they are bad. “Commonsense,” like calling for “doing the right thing,” is politics in disguise according…
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