Religion Dispatches
…Song, and it deals with all the data amassed by the survey that I couldn’t use in Then Sings My Soul—over 700 fans and professionals responded, generating more than 3,000 separate prose-based responses to various prompts. The Gospel Sensibility is grounded in listening to and analyzing the voices of Southern gospel music. In the process, the book aims to provide the first sustained critical account of how people collectively and individually use S…
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…ht God wanted you to live—by you, too! (Whoever you are.) And so we didn’t use artificial contraception. We used natural family planning (i.e. charts and thermometers), because we did not want to form ourselves to be the sort of people who were closed off to intrusive, vulnerable life. That was the logic. You use artificial contraception, and it might just form you into the kind of person who is not willing to be intruded upon by the very vulnerab…
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…comedies in which Chico and Harpo are running a slick little scam. They’ve used a fishing pole to hook a dollar bill. Chico uses the money to buy something. The seller then pockets the bill. As soon as he starts to walk off, Harpo deftly pulls back on his pole, retrieving the money and delivering it to Chico: who then turns around and uses it to scam the next customer. How many of our charitable contributions are like that? Even after we’ve handed…
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…eople have written to me to tell me that they would like to burn down my house, because of my championing of religion); and I have had a lot of abuse from people because I write positively about Islam; some Christians in Holland objected vociferously when I was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal; Catholics in the UK have hated my work. But I am writing about contentious issues that arouse a good deal of passion. If I did not att…
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…didn’t know those terms. Yet scholars seem to be more rigid about similar uses of language related to sex. I would also make use of recent literature on aspiring saints and feigned sanctity, clarifying what seems to be less than obvious, that religion and sexuality are not either/or categories, but both/and. I have seen your book in quite surprising places: in women’s bookstores and big chain stores, on syllabi in religious studies, history, and…
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…go through multiple layers of approval, to the point where you can’t even use the word LGBT. They’ll use something like “Spectrum” or “Welcome Ministry.” It has to be so coded that it doesn’t ruffle any feathers, and that’s not the case for women. And that’s very sad. To me, LGBT people are sometimes treated like lepers. One of the things I’ve learned in this informal ministry is the unbelievable things priests, sisters, brothers and lay associat…
Read More…s performing what comedy. Another is that the term Mormon has already been used to promote professional endeavors. In the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, a race car driver from Utah named Ab Jenkins set records for speed racing in vehicles he called the “Mormon Meteor.” No one suggested that he was claiming that his car was endorsed by the LDS establishment. Finally, officially registered trademarks can and do become so genericised that the original holder…
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…socio-cultural and religious ceremonies.” Faced with a soaring rate of Diabetes caused by the abandonment of traditional foods for “white” food products, the Tohono O’odham of the Sonora Desert have organized through communal institutions to support a return to their nearly extinct thousand-year-old former diet, writes Marcello di Cintio in Gastronomica. This so-far successful process, an exemplary case study of the kind of resistance to the West…
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…victed for doing his job.” He has, moreover, encouraged police officers to use violence on suspects. “Why show restraint?” the American president repeatedly asked police officers in Long Island, equating roughing up of suspects with the enforcement of law. And it is an equation: for Trump, as for Arpaio, unchecked power—the violence of the state, aimed at citizens, at journalists, or at “illegals”—is not merely a prerogative, it is a good. This is…
Read More…would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it.” Just so. Sigh….
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