Religion Dispatches
…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…
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…mmunity that I can lead them to more familiarity with a very great text. A number of times you bring up Thomas Jefferson’s abridgement of the Gospels. He seems to be someone who, in some ways, you’re identifying with but also making very different choices from. I don’t have the luxury of just snipping out the parts of the Bible I don’t like. Whereas I greatly admire Jefferson and the Enlightenment figures for their courage in blasting through so m…
Read More…futations of Barton’s bogus empiricism. I’ve considered these questions a number of times recently in observing historians struggling to deal with the popularity of figures such as David Barton, who bowdlerize history but get the kind of attention few actual historians receive for their work. To What Effect? These debates go back a long way. When I was in college at a Baptist denominational school in Oklahoma, the biology professor, a man about…
Read More…d that 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…
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…sful forger in American history, having sold dozens of fake documents to a number of institutions for a total of over a million dollars. Hofmann’s is a story that is so enthralling that it would capture the nation’s admiration were it not for the outright fraud and tragic reality that it resulted in lost lives, broken homes, and devastated communities. This Wednesday, March 3, Netflix will release Murder Among the Mormons, a three-part documentary…
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…nce existed mainly to train full-time pastors faced reductions in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a…
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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…
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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…e sex, U.S., 1960.” 4. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 97. 5. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, ibid. 6. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, p. 98. 7. See Mitter, ibid., p. 99. 8. “Man-womanish”: Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 85. “Oc…
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…mblazoned in our cultural consciousness. On November 18, 1978, the largest number of American civilian lives was lost due to a single non-natural disaster—a sad distinction Jonestown would hold until September 11, 2001. In Stories from Jonestown, the most recent addition to the Jonestown library, Leigh Fondakowski has compiled the numerous interviews that she conducted in order to write her play, The People’s Temple, which ran at the Berkeley Rep…
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