Religion Dispatches
…mon ground toward the “End of The Culture Wars,” fired off a few rounds anyway. Which brings us back to the beginning. Whatever the merits of getting a handful of conservative evangelicals to publicly agree to positions already embraced by the vast majority of Americans (sexuality education and availability of contraception); or that the laws already require in many places and common decency demands (non-discrimination in employment for gays and l…
Read More…t Muhammad (saw), when there were NO electrical lights, NO paved roads, NO phones. There was no way for anyone to know that a caravan had arrived until it was pretty near to its destination. Then a missionary was sent to alert the people of the town that that caravan had nearly arrived and was camped in the outskirts the night before their arrival. This allows for the townspeople to get ready to receive them. There is NOTHING sacred about Muzdhali…
Read More…racticing Protestants” just sounds funny. They don’t practice. Not the old way. If one ponders what the Protestants endeavored to take away, then they are almost all matters of materiality and attendant practices: holy water and incense, statues and frescoes, saints and pilgrimages, monasteries and celibacy, Maryology, “real presence” in the Eucharist. At the conclusion of the Reformation’s fundamental re-imagining of what religion is at its core,…
Read More…y she said again, “if the Lord tells me.” So, I asked her if there was any way she could speak to the Lord and she turned to me with indignation and said “I speak to the Lord, every day.” I think the way she explained it was, ‘I speak to him’ but I don’t tell him what to do. And I wait for him to speak to me, on this, that (and the other). Honestly, I found this very curious. Because I have always been taught, even as a Christian, that I had respo…
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…rican exceptionalism, and that this same resurgent whitemanism—which has always had strong elements of Freud’s death drive (Todestrieb) baked into it—will keep us from averting the worst possible environmental apocalypse. Another way to put this: The times, they aren’t a-changin’. And time itself is very short. UPDATE: Is a Fixation on Race Betraying the Class Struggle? Take this as an addendum to my above post. And yes, this belongs on RD. Fo…
Read More…Refuge in 2016, offers a perspective from which to view the very specific way Trump has actively traded on the close kinship between Whiteness and the ritualistic (re)enactment of land, resource, and space dominion in American culture. Perhaps more than any other scholar to date, George Lipsitz has explored what he calls the “the racialization of space and the spatialization of race,” and the ways in which the possessive investment in Whiteness f…
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…to win back working class Catholics. Krueger says that the best political way forward for the Democrats is what he calls a “50-state/all constituencies” strategy that includes a strong Catholic outreach component. He notes that Hillary Clinton’s outreach to Catholics was notably less robust than Barack Obama’s. She didn’t recruit prominent Catholic backers the way that Obama did and skipped important Catholic outreach opportunities like a Saint P…
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…to school for one last day, and I’ll keep a coffee date. Life goes on, one way or another. At the same time, it seems spectacularly incompatible with the declared teachings of most religions to act so recklessly when so many lives are in the balance. So I’d like to propose a variation on Pascal’s famous wager: if you act as though COVID-19 were a real menace and you turn out to be wrong, you’ve lost nothing more than a few handshakes in church. Bu…
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…is unexplainable without that deep history of thought.” But is that not a way of explaining inevitability? On the question of determinism, Nirenberg is right: it is better for the historian to be “reflective” rather than “dogmatic.” But is it dogmatic to point out the frequent connections between murderous rhetoric and genocide? Describing the world in anti-Jewish (or anti-Tutsi or anti-Armenian) terms does not always lead to violence, but such r…
Read More…lves: down from 65% of Americans surveyed to 61%. Some measurable gains have been made among mainline Protestants: 28% surveyed in 2011 said they have “a lot in common” with Mormons; now, that proportion is 42%. And when asked to give a one asked to give a one-word descriptor of Mormonism, the number of respondents offering a positive word like “good,” or “honest,” increased from 18% in 2011 to 24% in 2012. All of these gains were concentrated a…
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