Religion Dispatches
…ho felt like their identities and their stories weren’t represented in the most dominant atheist narratives. How would you characterize narrative American atheism has told about itself? If we actually asked atheists to historicize themselves as a movement, to tell a collective story, what would that sound like? Though there is a fascinating history of American atheism, it’s hard to answer that question right now. We’re a small and frequently dem…
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…uth Colin B. Chapell University of Alabama Press September 2016 What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Theology and belief matter to how people view not only the world around them, but how adherents view their own identity. I know that this may sound simple, but we so often forget this. Indeed, I would enlarge that statement to say that the values people hold dearest change how they understand their own identity. If academic achi…
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…stematic violence. It intends to silence and to destroy from within. While most of us will never be physically attacked by another human being, all of us know we are targets. A Theology of Anti-Gay Bullying Anti-gay bullying is a theological issue because it has a theological base. I find it difficult to believe that even those among us with a vibrant imagination can muster the creative energy to picture a reality in which anti-gay violence and bu…
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…e Bakker’s Evangelical Empire John Wigger Oxford UP August 2017 What’s the most important take-home message for readers? PTL helps to explain the persistent connections between religion and popular culture in American life, a connection that runs deeper than politics alone. PTL grew so quickly because of its embrace of consumer and celebrity culture, much of it through the prosperity gospel, but along the way the money and fame undermined the reli…
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…care, the dominant conservative position has always been whichever was the most anti-Black of the legitimate options. And yet it remains difficult to have it admitted to public consciousness that American conservatism is organized anti-Black politics. American conservatism is, however, well-dressed white nationalism. Racists have put conservatism on like a hat, then disappeared in front of the eyes of those for whom object permanence would prefera…
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…hey Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be, the book brings together some of the most influential pieces of scholarship on evangelicalism from the last forty years and places it alongside a handful of new essays that finally do attempt to grapple with evangelical support for Donald Trump. The sense of surprise that continues to confront evangelical zealotry for Trump might be Noll, Marsden, and Bebbington’s greatest legacy. The table of contents is a ve…
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…inced that this is a sizable community worthy of serious study. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? By studying vampires, we study ourselves. I am concerned that despite the best intention of many scholars, the term “new religious movement” (a label that has been applied to vampires) carries with it the subtext that a group is totally “other.” While it may be comforting to think that we are totally different from vampires, thi…
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…center stage in the halls of the United States Congress in the latest and most blatant McCarthy-esque twist in the rising level of Islamophobia in the United States. Anti-Muslim diatribe and activity have reached what Marshall Breger, a law professor at Catholic University, an Orthodox Jew and a Republican, has described as a “season of singular national distemper where, for reasons best understood by social psychiatrists, the American people hav…
Read More…. It was a moving piece on nature of hope and belief. Aslan’s post focuses mostly on the charitable work of the Aga Khan and asks the key question that immediately came to my mind when I started looking for coverage of the Aga Khan’s visit: “Americans are interested in hearing a major Muslim leader speak of tolerance and cooperation, so why isn’t the media covering the Aga Khan’s visit?” Patel, with his interfaith interest, focused on the message…
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…ious control of family law; • and religious control of public education. Almo*]}*st half of the countries of the world have laws or policies that penalize blasphemy, apostasy, contempt of religion, or religious “hate speech,” according to the new analysis by Pew. Of the 198 countries studied, 32 (16%) have anti-blasphemy laws, 20 (10%) have laws against apostasy, and 87 (44%) have laws against the defamation of religion, including hate speech against…
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