Religion Dispatches
…t shout back ‘Ground Zero mosque,’ ‘Ground Zero mosque.’” In December, the New York Times ran a small story on the prayer space downtown and its plans to transition into a larger Muslim center. Alarm spread quickly with many conservatives, as Zachary Roth reported in May, “driven to apoplexy” by the proposal. Beginning in the blogosphere, enmity quickly trickled upward, eventually reaching public figures and candidates eager to exploit a divisive…
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…le of such attempts were those of U.S. Postal Inspector and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, who used his position in the postal service to censor whatever he deemed a threat to the evangelical Protestant Christian morals he identified as American. Unsurprisingly, Craddock’s teachings on yoga conflicted with Comstock’s ideals, so he sought to enforce legal standards that would qualify her teachings as…
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…he Vatican articulated growing support for unions in encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum, many a prelate worried that they might prove a gateway out of the Church and into the clutches of godless radicalism. This tale of churchly opposition to the early labor movement is a relatively familiar one. What’s new in Union Made are the stories of printers, glovemakers, blacksmiths, seamstresses, and the like, who insisted that trade unionism was fully com…
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…We are now in the twenty-first century,” writes Tibet’s leading monk. “The world is also facing a lot of new problems, most of which are man-made. The root cause of these man made problems is the inability of human being to control their agitated minds. How to control such a state of mind is taught by the various religions of this world.” The Dalai Lama advocates prayer and meditation as an antidote to the mind’s capacity for mischief. But he ins…
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…cially children) afraid of helping professionals. “Children can no longer trust their teachers, doctors, or the societal structures that claim to protect them,” Matt Walsh’s blurb declares. This theme—distrusting helpers—is, in fact, the main argument of Mandel and Markowicz’s book. Because helpers today have become “woke,” they argue, adults and children alike should avoid them. Stolen Youth begins with Mandel and Markowicz claiming there is “dan…
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…y gay Anglican bishop, Gene Robinson, was confirmed). The code word for most of that uproar is “anti-Modern.” So the irony of Catholic anti-Modernism multiplies, morphs, turns back on itself. The logic of Catholic anti-Modernism, as it were, is capitalist to the core. The Vatican looks at the world map and analyzes new growth markets. When one source of material resources dries up, the empire marches determinedly on. From this perspective, China r…
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…inism’s overall impact in the late 19th century pales in comparison to the runaway impact of Russell Conway’s “acres of diamonds” preaching. He demonstrates in a similar way how the postwar flowering of a potent culture of anti-union conservatism among Southern California’s evangelical and parachurch movements was entirely self-created and not simply the result of solicitation or manipulation by that era’s business leaders. Say it again: religion…
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…g the nasty, so to speak, was only one element of virginity in the ancient world. As Elizabeth Johnson argues in Truly Our Sister, virgins weren’t so much people who avoided the contamination of sexuality as those who gave up their desire in order to maintain a single-minded focus on serving God. It’s only later, as the monastic emphasis on rigorous purity sets in, that virgins became those who have never taken part in vaginal intercourse. Even so…
Read More…d other federal government agencies. The anti-choice and anti-LGBT LifeSiteNews has run a two-part series of articles from anti-gay activist Peter LaBarera on “what really goes on” at the International LGBT Leaders Conference that was organized by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Institute in December. Among his shocking discoveries: gay U.S. ambassadors, gender-neutral bathrooms, “Gays for Trump” and activists gearing up to preserve gains made during…
Read More…dowment established this mosque had no children of his own, and saw this structure as his legacy for the world. We’re used to monumentalism in sacred spaces, the deployment of largeness for the purposes of producing epiphanies. There is however a sustained tradition in Islamic aesthetics of smallness cultivating and sustaining piety, incorporating tiny gestures, subtle symmetries, and easily overlooked details, whose full effect is to cause us to…
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