Religion Dispatches
…ation. As a Muslim, I’m exhausted. You may think that what plagues Muslims today is a rowdy minority of gung-ho militants in the desert of Iraq and Syria. I think our problem is more subtle than that. We have convinced ourselves, and others, that we live on a planet apart as perfect Muslims who speak exclusively as agents and caretakers of their faith. The spectrum of our visibility is narrow: we are either the fanatic bad Muslim or the sanitized…
Read More…explored in a piece for the Daily Beast in June), particularly his role in promoting homeschooling, Lizza gives short shrift to Rushdoony, who is not only a “prominent Dominionist,” as Lizza describes him, but the founder of Christian Reconstructionism and Titus’ inspiration. And, as Julie Ingersoll has detailed on numerous occasions, “Christian Reconstructionist founder Rousas John Rushudoony is often called the father of the Christian homeschool…
Read More…rying to put the best face on their prejudice. For example, UK’s Christian Today editors are trying to convince people that it’s not bigotry to reserve the word “marriage” for heterosexual couples and call all those “gay marriages” civil partnerships. But being different doesn’t have to mean bad or discriminatory. Relationships can be held in equal regard by the state and society, but accommodated by both differently – a single mother may receive…
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…his head, killing him. Cain and Abel’s remarkable argument is little known today, but it is not a mere blip on the radar of biblical interpretation. It exists in different versions in other Targum manuscripts, including fragments found in the Cairo Geniza, showing that it was discussed, revised, and transmitted across Jewish communities. And it is representative of a concern with justice we can see in many other texts where Jewish interpreters gra…
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…ng the two together, I’m always forced to choose. Will I be Asian American today or gay today? In the LGBT community, even where I feel really safe, I rarely hear anything that affirms my cultural background or the racism of notions of beauty in the community. Singularity is the sin that resonates with me—forcing people to choose one thing over another in terms of our identities. Hybridity, like an apple-pear blend, gets to the notion that we can…
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…gies, philosophies, languages, medical therapies, diets, rites of passage, codes of conduct, aesthetic norms, artistic conventions, and technologies furnish entire communities with a shared sense of identity and the ritual/theological grammars required to guide their common life and transmission of humanity from one generation to the next. If God’s good nature is reflected in the slave trade, what was the Devil up to? American ignorance of Vodou b…
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…k the capital of Portugal on November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day. Scientists today speculate that it probably registered as a nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hi…
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…ic legacy, voices such as these cannot be found among the Mormon hierarchy today. After the 2008 crash, the Mormon Conference focused on economic issues, but narrowly, stressing individual thrift and endurance rather than taking on socioeconomic structures or public policy. I had assumed that the silence on the part of today’s Mormon leadership was due to ignorance. It had gotten out of touch. Mormon Leaks has disabused me of that assumption. Elde…
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…m the Rune Stone using such techniques as dowsing rods for divining hidden codes within the runes. Some of these new narratives describe large settlements of Christian Vikings who lived in Minnesota for centuries following Leif Eriksson’s arrival in Vinland. There is a ready market for such wild speculation on cable television, but Krueger notes that these tales of ancient European settlers effectively marginalize America’s actual original inhabit…
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…central tenets of American culture. But as we have documented here at RD, today’s “religious freedom fighters” are waging a very different battle than did this nation’s Founders when they considered the concept of freedom of religion important enough to be included in the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The confusion begins to mount when Gjelten begins to discuss real-world examples. He writes: If a football coach is not allowed to…
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