Religion Dispatches
…t in their diagnosis of our moral rot…. While their solution—Sharia law—is wrong, they are not wrong about what ails us.” Thomas doesn’t say what the right solution is, but it doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that, for him, it is Biblical law. His problem is not with religious law, as long as it is the right religious law. When people react with such vehemence against the building of mosques, they are revealing far more about themselves than abou…
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…d that we must return to that golden age of the American founding. This is wrong. The Founding Fathers chose to keep state and church separate precisely because religion is divisive and they were seeking to build a pluralistic nation. They didn’t build that nation or secure our freedom with theology or prayer, but with a Constitution that draws its power from We the People, not We the Christians. Religion only unites believers of the same stripe,…
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…ed with any request—even for help in an illicit underground economy. Doing Wrong for all the Right Reasons Serving God and money is Jay-Z’s way of addressing the contradiction that comes from living in a neighborhood where there are a thousand ways of believing and little evidence that conditions are improving. Jay-Z lyrically balances the external forces of poverty and oppression with the adrenaline rush and capitalist successes of the hustler’s…
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…s How did scholars use to think about the brain and the self? And what was wrong with that? Somewhere in the history of Western thought in particular, we ended up with this model of subjects as primarily linguistic thinking beings. There’s this notion that the first thing that happens leading to an action is a word. [In affect theory,] rather than thinking about the self as being a language—as being like a computer code that speaks—we think about…
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…Dismissing this process of father-son bonding as merely creepy or morally wrong doesn’t go far enough in assessing the depth and breadth of its importance and impact on the political subjectivity of White evangelical men and the fomenting of fascist desire. This spiritual battle is also grounded in scientific research. Covenant Eyes pairs neurological studies that link addiction and porn with fear-inducing statistics. The opening to the free down…
Read More…than non-Christians (43% to 22%); within Christians, Evangelicals say it’s wrong more than others (46% to 34%). Dear Christ, what is wrong with us? Well, here’s one idea: David Gushee, looking at the same poll, apparently zeroes in on the 37% of lay people who think it’s not a sin to get divorced at all. Gushee denounces what he calls “routine divorce”: In western culture today, individuals almost always are free to marry, or not marry, if and whe…
Read More…l detect my stomp first, and some will detect your stomp first. Neither is wrong, because for such pairs of events there is no “real” order. This is not a matter of mere appearances or light travel times or time zones, but is part of the way the universe is put together. In general, the ordering of events is relative. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. To sober up and qualify things a bit: For the sequence of any pair of events to be inv…
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…ness by remaining strictly neutral on the culture of the “Other.” They are wrong. In fact, by responding to some Muslim voices instead of others, by anointing groups like Revolution Muslim as de facto representatives of “Islam” and “Muslim opinion,” they are taking sides in important theological-political disputes internal to Islamic communities. And they are taking the wrong sides: with theological conservatives and Islamist governments, against…
Read More…that principle, Governor, that I wanted you to be able to, no, no, that’s wrong, Reverend Jeffress. Instead of saying as you did, “Boy, that introduction knocked the ball out of the park,” I’d have said, “Reverend Jeffress, you got that wrong. We should select people not based upon their faith.” Even though — and I don’t suggest you distance yourself from your faith any more than I would. But the concept that we select people based on the church…
Read More…grounder. The bishops say that “unjust discrimination in the workplace” is wrong, but that discriminating against people who have gay sex is not “unjust.” Here’s how the backgrounder explains why gay people who have sex have “no claim” to legal protections: Why is the absence of a distinction between same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex attraction in ENDA problematic? While the Church is opposed to unjust discrimination on any grounds, including t…
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