Religion Dispatches
…te the lyrics to the song out in thick black marker on the blank backs of cardboard box tops and rehearse at home, accompanying herself with the guitar until I became old enough to provide the accompaniment on the piano. And then there’s Maude’s friend Maxine, who had a smoker’s rich throaty alto but who made her biggest impression on me as a pianist. Maxine played in this capaciously graceful, wide-stride gospel church-lady style that was almost…
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…sts about religious trends in the United States. Evans, author of the popular A Year of Biblical Womanhood, expresses her frustration with church leaders who think that getting millenials back to the churches involves little more than “a few style updates—edgier music, more casual services, a coffee shop in the fellowship hall, a pastor who wears skinny jeans, an updated Web site that includes online giving.” Citing polling data, Evans notes that…
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…ff. As a result, the 35 charges that the Church leveled against the Talmud are carefully grounded in the text. Translated by Hoff, these charges will, at times, make an uncomfortable amount of sense to the modern reader. Among other points, the Church claims that the Talmud incites Jewish violence against Christians, contains blasphemous teachings about God, and says terrible things about Christian holy figures. The language is terse and outraged:…
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…e like Marilynne Robinson (even if we haven’t always seen eye to eye) and Harvard Kennedy School’s Richard Parker. Alas, I must now surrender at least some of this idolatry, thanks to the work of one Matthew Stewart, a resourceful independent scholar who celebrates some bold 19th century human rights advocates who were denounced by respectable Christians and Unitarians as dangerous infidels. Stewart documents how the respectable religious element…
Read More…ess my frustration that, when I was growing up in Singapore, people in my part of Asia had little access to Dharma and practice. The “Buddhism” most people knew back then was going to temples to ask statues for winning lottery numbers. There were (and still are) highly enlightened monks and nuns, no doubt, and they hold the purest Dharma of all, but most civilians had little access to or understanding of the practice. I know that things have been…
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…d me, and among whom I must count myself, have thoroughly demonstrated how little we care about our representation of Christ to the world, how gleefully willing we are to put our own interests and grievances above the teachings of Jesus. And we have done that where we always do it: in the voting booth. https://twitter.com/YNPierce/status/796209685976195073?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/prestonyancey/status/796213619834974210?ref_src=twsr…
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…t. But if you read this first word as a verb, as most Hebrew biblical scholars argue you should, then the bet modifies that verb, and you get something like “when began.” That leads to a translation something like, “When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth,” which was already there when God began creating, “was formless void.” Taken this way, we have a story that begins not at some absolute metaphysical beginning, with nothing,…
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…evangelicals. Some folks invested in religious outreach, such as Michael Wear, aren’t quite as willing to give up the fight, but if Burge’s numbers are right, Dems would have better luck in pursuing other segments of the religious voter pool—white Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated in particular. You mention evangelical youth, which I think is particularly relevant. One pattern we’ve known about for many years is that young voters tend to…
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…if you live in New York you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.” During a week of religious collision that once meant trouble, it is hopeful that the names Catholics and Jews once called each other may soon be as forgotten as Yoshke Pan Drek. In the meantime, even a goy a called Pesach can be pleased to live at time when holy days intersect without bloodshed, in a place where rituals inform…
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…writers mused whether a man would respond in the same way. Ouch. As a scholar, it is hard to know where to start with such material. Given a similar paper from a college student or as a journal submission, I would point the writers to decades of careful, complex feminist study in myriad fields—notably psychology, sociology, philosophy, literature, and yes, even theology—that have led to far deeper analyses of these matters. Would the Vatican Obser…
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