Religion Dispatches
…a foetor Judaicus, “a Jewish stench.” Nirenberg emphasizes that he is not looking to evaluate these philosophers on the basis of their antisemitism. He wants to explain how their “habits of thought about Judaism” shaped their views of how the world worked. This reader, however, found it difficult to remain disinterested about these “habits of thought” when reading the passages about Marx. In an (admittedly obscure) essay on Jewish emancipation, M…
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…country, who believes he would serve it well, who believes that he is the best American for the job. And since all Americans are assumed to be, at base, Judeo-Christian, then it is no lie at all to say that he is, at base, a good Christian man. And so he is. A good Christian man. He says it, and we have to believe him. We, the scholars. You, the voters. We believe him against the evidence because it feels better to believe that his life—his survi…
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…the pandemic? Definitely the Fifth Tenet: Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs. We have to defer to scientists on this, especially the projection models of epidemiologists. We also have to reject conspiracy theories, including blaming the current crisis on the Obama administration. Any others? As we become frustrated over the respons…
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…ned that the first word means “most” and the second word “least.” Wow! The best of both worlds. Or both words. So off went the $4.99 (plus $1.50 shipping and handling) and back came this weird little booklet that looked like it had been mimeographed. In a garage. Poorly. Every single sentence ended with an exclamation point (for some reason, I was okay with that). My brother Jerry and I spent a summer month following its grueling instructions on h…
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…eventually fell. The appeals that characterized the King-led marches work best and perhaps only work where the issues are literally black and white. Even then they worked only with great difficulty. Civil rights—with its images of police dogs and fire hoses, tear gas and nightsticks, “white only” and “colored only” facilities, humble black protagonists and arrogant white antagonists, black Christians and white sinners—lent itself easily, relative…
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…nd if we’re going to compete in the world market, we both have to have the best equipment and the best training. But Santorum doesn’t care about the facts, because attacking Obama on higher education is really just a pretext for pushing what is, for him, a more urgent message—namely that higher education should be viewed as a problem, not an opportunity. Although he currently frames this message in the Tea Party language of “liberal professors” an…
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…ion had few misgivings about the rightness of chattel slavery. Their ranks numbered legendary compromiser Henry Clay of Kentucky and planter-statesmen John Randolph and Richard Bland Lee of Virginia. Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, was so named in 1824 to honor another slavery-supporting Southerner who happened to occupy the White House at the time: President James Monroe. And while some early proponents of colonization, like William Lloyd Garrison,…
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…the Catholic health care system—advocates do their best to make the other look as bad as possible, interpreting all events through a glass darkly. (In both cases, curiously, the two ‘demons’ are actually very popular; Planned Parenthood admired as an early advocate of family planning for low income women, and the Catholic health care system for the “sisters” who cared for the poor.) In the case of Planned Parenthood, anti-choicers cast its founde…
Read More…r asks her baby daddy, well what will we do out here in the desert? And he looks and away, “God will provide.” Well thank you very much, old man—that’s just what I will do then, rely on God. So he walks off and leaves them; leaves a woman and her child, his child, in the desert, out there by themselves. He might as well had gone ahead and killed the child earlier if that was the best he could do! Deadbeat dad. Now Ms. Hajar, for all of her earlier…
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…-oriented popular culture, especially music. Planned Parenthood is perhaps best understood as representing the larger successes of liberal feminism, the movement primarily responsible for legalizing abortion. Rock for Life does not see abortion as a women’s rights issue; to them it is a social and cultural issue which affects everyone. Even though the group readily engages the issues of unwed mothers and teen pregnancy, they frame their argument s…
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