Religion Dispatches
…ness and diversity of our tradition. Faced with the revelation that 73% of today’s American Jews regard remembering the Shoah as a lynchpin of their Judaism, I see educational and spiritual opportunity knocking. That three in every minyan don’t identify with a particular denomination intrigues me. Given today’s three transdenominational seminaries (ALEPH, AJR, and Hebrew College) I suspect that percentage may grow in years to come. For me that’s a…
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…to be held accountable for their racism. Too many people are hearing this coded rhetoric and deciding that the real problem with the economy must be folks of color, immigrants, and the Jews.” During the last period of Patriot and militia growth in the mid-1990s, Ward witnessed this coded racist rhetoric being tested in the margins of the right-wing media, though it has since moved into the mainstream. In the past year I’ve interviewed dozens of a…
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…on Lady Gaga’s (non)religion can thus be summed up in Baudrillard’s words: today, we have moved from a theology of truth and secrecy… [into] an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection. Lady Gaga is nothing other than an artificial resurrection. Like the ostensibly esoteric symbols that are so prevalent in…
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…on titled “About Pennsylvania Pastors Network,” the group points out “that today our society is struggling morally and spiritually [and there is a] constant battle—the family’s fight for its soul. The attack on our culture is imminent, and the truth is: We can stop it. As clergy, you hold the hearts of the people in your hands, and when people need someone to turn to for answers, you are there. We want to help equip you with the information and re…
Read More…ss of pretense. Our old friend self-deception But the hypocrisy we witness today may not be so much acts of pretense and public false performance as self-deception. In Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations, Béla Szabados and Eldon Soifer suggest that our perception of hypocrisy has shifted in modern times. If Biblical and Medieval thinkers saw hypocrisy primarily as a matter of pretense, of the difference between the inner morality and outward perform…
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…to produce a child? Well, of course, there are so many more possibilities today in terms reproductive technology than the Torah, Talmud, or our medieval and early modern codes could have imagined! Certainly, some things possible in our world had been sufficiently anticipated by earlier Jews that we have a basis for discussion; there were forms of birth control mentioned in the Talmud, for example. And there are even intimations of the questions r…
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…in a whole series of laws, many of which we pay absolutely no attention to today. Such as? There’s a law that says you can’t wear blends of cotton and linen, or wool and linen. Nobody rails against people wearing blends today. There were very specific reasons for those laws that no longer make sense. In order to understand the reasoning behind “no man shall lie with another man” we have to take into account the fact that at that time they didn’t u…
Read More…ts back to one that many speakers, including Reed and Gingrich, emphasized today: that not only did God ordain a limited role for government, God, and not the government, is the source of individual rights. “God gives you sovereignty,” said Gingrich, and “the government doesn’t define rights.” In other words, if the government tells you to buy insurance under the individual mandate, it’s not only infringing on your God-given rights, but exceeding…
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…with state-sponsored heterosexuality. Remember canon law to common law to… today’s law. So, among the tax resisters today might be many members of gay, lesbian, and other communities. In 2008, for example, Melissa Etheridge publicly stated that she would refuse to pay a portion of her California taxes as a result of Proposition 8’s passage. And that spring, in 2009, there was a raft of protests at various post offices on April 15. This year, other…
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…iew of the most politically consequential demographic in the United States today. White evangelical Christians wield their disproportionate political power via their domination in the Republican Party, and 81% of them voted for Donald Trump in 2016. They remain his core group of support, standing behind him during his impeachment, and they are a key to his re-election bid in 2020. The evangelical scholar Mark Noll has criticized the lack of “serio…
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