Religion Dispatches
…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe 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 mo…
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…course of a festival like Bonnaroo, with maybe about three hundred approaching him for a substantive exchange. Sure enough, just as we end our conversation, a dusty, goateed young man is waiting for Te’Devan’s attention. In a few minutes, the two of them are seated on the ground, their eyes closed in meditation. This would not have surprised Maria McGuire, the yoga instructor, at all. A practicing Catholic, she has been coming to Bonnaroo for yea…
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…s calculations, 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…
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…tion that orient the quest for improvement, the traditional religious and philosophical narratives that are tacitly embedded in this quest, and the shame many people experience as a byproduct of their particular body’s refusal to live up to the normative ideal. (Notice my preference for the word refusal—instead of failure—in the previous sentence). My analysis interrogates prominent religious/cultural norms and narratives that encourage us to go t…
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…of superior level. Not long ago I helped lead a graduate seminar in leadership in which I challenged the old idea of the heroic leader and messianic deliverer; an idea that has deep roots in all three Abrahamic faith traditions. Not one person in that seminar room—not even the white males who were present—had anything good thing to say about the old model. Everyone agreed that we could do better by listening to each other, trusting each other, and…
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…t the high point of so-called “modernity.” And contrary to what you might think, higher education levels do not directly result in disenchantment. Indeed, one might hazard the guess that education allows one to maintain more cognitive dissonance rather than less. Secularization and disenchantment are also not correlated. Moreover, it is easy to show that, almost no matter how you define the terms, there are few figures in the history of the academ…
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…stances. To use Paine’s language, we don’t need the the kind of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots who will stuff themselves with “birthday” cake this weekend while remaining oblivious to the stakes in the present crisis….
Read More…le who disagree with us want the same things everyone else wants—companionship, love, and dignity—and think marriage redefinition will get them there. You and I disagree with them on this, but we cannot reach them if we don’t understand who they are and why they think the way they do. Moore pointedly confessed that “we are all too often mean and nasty when it comes to people who disagree with us,” and condemned anti-gay bullying, calling on Christ…
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…s Fox. It’s actually as old as the pro-life movement. In 1982, one of the philosophical architects of the religious right was reporting wild rumors of infanticide as fact. Francis Schaeffer, who “wakened the cultural consciousness of the evangelical community,” in the words of the director of the Francis Schaeffer Collection at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, was willing to believe sketchy reports that infanticide was becoming an accept…
Read More…is on exactly that question. 44% think Clinton could handle race better, 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…
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