Religion Dispatches
…ct warns that “the significance and effectiveness of the various forms of [online] expression appear to be determined more by their popularity than by their intrinsic importance and value.” One can imagine the pope wringing his hands in frustration at the lack of civility in online arguments about anything from celebrity divorces to the afterlife: “In the digital environment, too, where it is easy for heated and divisive voices to be raised and wh…
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…nifesto that for the National Day of Unplugging they’ve partnered with the online service VolunteerMatch to help participants connect to local organizations who might need their assistance. Assuming that “unplugging” necessarily makes us more connected or attentive to relationships with God, others and the rest of creation often seems to me, then, to blame technology for what is an essential human failing. Maybe your buzzing “crackberry” makes it…
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…ged in my seat at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre as I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to…
Read More…n our sacred land, like any person on Earth.” Complicating this dynamic is American missionaries’ own fraught history with indigenous groups, corporate interests, foreign governments, and local officials in the Amazon. Researchers Gerald Colby and Carlotte Dennett demonstrate how the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and its sister organization the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT), spread throughout the Amazon basin during the mid twentieth c…
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…iferated in illustrated books and prints suitable for display in the home, Americans increasingly approached God through images as well as texts, and those images reinforced their devotion.”12 In the dream life of American culture, mass-marketed depictions of Jesus, from Warner Sallman’s pensive, doe-eyed Head of Christ (1941), distributed by the millions to servicemen during World War II, to the Fabio-haired prizefighter messiah of Stephen S. Saw…
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…reements about matters concerning Israel. We can point to the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism; the non-statist American Zionists, such as rabbis Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen Wise (who only agreed to join Ben-Gurion’s statist project after the Biltmore Conference in May, 1942); and the anti-occupation group Breira that emerged after the Yom Kippur War in 1973; among many others. The new heresy The identification of Zionism with Jewishne…
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…complex cultural systems, and the toxic mixture that comes together in the American Redoubt movement represents a feedback loop between American-style white supremacist patriarchy on the one hand, and the varieties of Christianity that have been invoked throughout U.S. history to uphold it, on the other. A similar dynamic can be observed in the conspiratorial John Birch Society (JBS), in which Catholic and Protestant members come together in advoc…
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…of a priest felt right. I wanted to make the priest’s total commitment to service, especially a service so rooted in wisdom, social justice, and peace. That this commitment entailed celibacy didn’t seem to matter—it was a sacrifice, after all. The vows only legitimated my deeper desire. Until I had a chance to live it out. Something about the politics of living in community coupled with the nobility of the cause—the work of God! – put a sour tast…
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…elation of sovereignty to power, citizens to the state, that characterizes American politics. Sovereignty, in American politics, is rooted in the people. Rather than resting in a monarch, American popular sovereignty is a matter of negotiation and compromise, a matter of relation. Not only does such popular sovereignty not look much like the old-school, European variety—which gets shorthanded as “tyranny” in our founding documents—it is also an id…
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…s HPA for the Win in June 2010, during which HPA mobilized huge numbers of online voters from across fandoms and online communities to win a $250,000 grant from the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Then there’s the current “Deathly Hallows” campaign, which centers on the release date of a Harry Potter movie—in this case, The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Nov. 19. The Deathly Hallows campaign will run for nine months—the time between the tw…
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