Religion Dispatches
…ibe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a moist handshake, the chance to feel the pulse of motion being exchanged between the performers and the crowd, the energy of the music being r…
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…unds, and then camp in a setting that offers little in the way of physical comfort. “People get turned inward and they find themselves being transformed.” She compares Bonnaroo to a spiritual “retreat” in the sense that the festival offers an experience that is prolonged and not always pleasant. And she is right. Whatever else it may be, Bonnaroo is an endurance event. “People come to Bonnaroo because they feel the need to change,” McGuire continu…
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…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…
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…ew thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy critique I’d developed of Deepak…
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…of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it, and the economic well-being of everyday people has parted company for good. Pol…
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…to entail) equated with an end of belief in magic and spirits? The issue becomes even more troubling when you realize that the canonical European theorists (anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and so on) who came up with the various accounts of modernity as disenchantment lived in the nineteenth century in the midst of spiritualist and occult revivals. Magic and séances were on the surface of European culture at the very moment that Europe…
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…the past few days I’ve seen a number of references to “America’s Birthday” coming up on Friday. If a commercial advertiser wants to say this, fine (I guess). But I have spotted a couple of otherwise sober-minded writers using the “birthday” tag as well, and their ignorance is more disturbing. July 4, 1776, was in no way the birthday of anything. It was the start of a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the time. If…
Read More…ons. It will be fascinating to see how dialogue between the LGBT Christian community and Southern Baptist leaders develops in the coming months, if it does. Russell Moore may have not had this level of conversation in mind when he called for congregations and individuals to seek to understand who LGBT persons are and why they think the way they do. Now it’s up to him to demonstrate exactly what that process should look like and to enter into face-…
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…n Minnesota who said children only become people at age 5. Another said “a common number that is going around is 4 years old.” Arguments that college students make to provoke activists and demonstrators should probably not be taken at face value, but more importantly neither these people nor McArdle’s article offered any data indicating an increase in support for infanticide. In fact, Gallup polls show Americans are pretty evenly divided on aborti…
Read More…er, while 46% think Trump could. Others, shall we say, do not. Buried deep in the poll summary, we find that black Protestants oppose Trump 89-8, which is nearly the 93-6 edge African-Americans in general gave Obama over Romney. Likewise, Hispanic Catholics favor Clinton 77-16, compared to the overall 71-27 Hispanic vote in 2012. Since both those groups are projected to make up the same portion of the electorate in 2016, if not larger, it might no…
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