Religion Dispatches
…rvard Divinity School’s Diana L. Eck has noted, “the most complex Buddhist city in the entire world.” When you think about it, we have also left a remarkable legacy of offerings for our fellow Americans, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. Consider, for example, the many temples and centers that serve as important hubs of religious education, spirituality, and community in and around large ethnic enclaves throughout the country, such as those under th…
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…of his Lower East Side apartment as a deadly H5N1 pandemic washes over the city, causing massive casualties and wreaking havoc to the social fabric. Better equipped and informed than the vast of majority of his fellow New Yorkers, the narrator composes a blog that chronicles his city’s struggles and wins an international following. The novel contains several plotlines, including the narrator’s own difficulties in forging personal relationships, hi…
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…the Sunday New York Times on public funding of hasidic schools in New York City which has raised an enormous backlash on social media and among many American Jews. Accusations of bias, unfairness, and even antisemitism, have floated across social media and Jewish journalism. It seems to me that there are a variety of issues here that have become mashed into one large set of accusations based on various interrelated but not identical components. Fi…
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Yeshiva University (YU), a storied New York City Orthodox Jewish institution, is the unlikely darling du jour of political and legal conservatives. Sued for discrimination by a group of students and alumni after it refused to recognize an undergraduate Pride Alliance group, YU claimed that New York State laws that require it to do so encroach upon its religious liberty. But YU would do well to proceed with caution. If the university wins this bat…
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…nts that native Alaskan women have abortions to obtain “a free trip to the city,” that Joe Biden is like Adolf Hitler, and that fatal child abuse is “actually a benefit to society because there aren’t needs for government services.” But Eastman’s rhetoric is more than incendiary. It’s an intentional and carefully constructed aspect of Eastman’s identity as an alumnus of the evangelical homeschooling movement, specifically the academic debate leagu…
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…my own reporting about The Family, which nobody gave a damn about until a number of Family members started getting caught in affairs. You know, did they care [that The Family was] providing lists of communists to Suharto for the genocide? Or about total war in Somalia? I remember a producer saying to me, and I kid you not: “What’s a Somalia?” What’s a Somalia? But! Oh, he had sex with someone he wasn’t married to! Who? Tell us more! We all have t…
Read More…as Republicans. Non-Christians overwhelmingly voted Obama/Biden—62% to 36%—numbers that surpassed the group’s 20-point margin for John Kerry in 2004 and the 15-point margin for Al Gore in 2000. Other findings: • Protestant voters, evenly divided between being registered as Democrats and Republicans, sided with Sen. McCain by a 53% to 46% margin, which was just half the margin accorded to George W. Bush in 2004 (57% to 42%), but within range of the…
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…Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range, everything between Reno and Salt Lake City—is a wasteland. Next, that Utah history began with the arrival of the Mormons; that Utah history and Mormon history are essentially the same thing; and that Utah history has no relevance outside the American West. Third, that polygamy was the only interesting thing going on in territorial Utah. And last, that only “card-carrying Mormons” (those with the church-issued I…
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…an wearing all red in the Southeastern part of the city (where most of the city’s Black and Latino population lived). Instructors often encouraged cadets to profile based on what they called “criminality”—referencing clothing, location, type of car, or even their gait in the process—instead of race and ethnicity, insisting that an ability to profile “criminality” was a key part of their jobs. If a cadet would not (or could not) adapt to the expect…
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…post that too often the church, broadly speaking, is “concerned more with numbers and dollars rather than a powerful ‘Ekklesia’ whose purpose is to bring the will and rule of God into our nation.” The result, she says, is a “culture of darkness filling our religious assemblies, governments and schools.” Taking churches to church is de rigueur among some NAR leaders. Indeed, Apostle Jim Garlow brought a similar message to City Elders, a NAR politi…
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