Religion Dispatches
…outreach to the kids who attend Harvey Milk school, teaching LGBT youth to use art for self-expression. And they offer single-stall unisex bathrooms that allow transgendered people to use the facilities without trouble. Varghese offers a different perspective noting that in some feminist circles, a female who transitions into a male is perceived as caving in to the patriarchal narrative. In these settings, straight women often find themselves ost…
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…e only sexual practices specifically condemned in the Bible are those that use or abuse another person—relations governed by a spirit of possession, objectification, and control—and this would be a sin for both straight and LGBT people. However, here our agreement frays. As someone who says he believes that “the Bible is the inerrant Word of God,” Mr. X is quick to point out that his site is godly precisely because it does not include “wicked” thi…
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…e you okay with your child marrying a scientist”—social scientists love to use that, because it’s a good measure of social distance—heck yeah, everyone would love their child to marry a scientist! These are highly educated people, who we hold in esteem. And “would you like your child to have more science education”—of course! But especially the more conservative faith traditions do sometimes feel like scientists overstep their bounds, and that the…
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…tends to be more ethnographic and qualitative. It’s a vicious circle, because women are socialized to ask certain kinds of questions, to be better listeners, and to be not as assertive or not as aggressive, so that also influences people’s choice of what to study and how to study it. Graduate school can also suck the genuine curiosity out of you—and this happens for men and women, though we respond to it differently. You are taught that you can’t…
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…ontinued for five more chapters concerning interactions and race relations between white and Black Jews during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Thankfully, Oxford University Press’ readers reined me in, and I was left with the much more compact, and much more readable text as it stands today, which focuses on the period from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Some scholars may wonder how large these groups were, especially since African Am…
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…ota spiritual leaders are careful regarding the details of their continued use of the Black Hills for religious purposes, there is no doubt they visit and still use their sacred sites on lands stolen over 135 years ago; lands they’re now forced to try to buy back. The brochure for the sale of the lands by Brock’s Auction House of South Dakota obliquely mentions the moment: “For 136 years, brave, strong, pioneering families… have forged the prairie…
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…these documents. A former Air Force intelligence officer told me that the use of biblical verses on cover sheets, in his experience, is “not at all surprising.” Many of those privy to such briefings probably would have been Christian, he suspects, and the rest “knew better than to object.” Scriptural errancy Those who want to recover their traditions from conflation with errant militarism can begin by correcting some simple misunderstandings that…
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…heologians like Origen who say “No, incense is bad, that’s what the pagans use.” But obviously they had to say it because people were using incense. I mean, you don’t issue a prohibition of something that no one’s doing. And then after the fact you have to make the rules. You could probably find that alternate church history you were looking for that way: “Things that have been banned” gives you information about those practices. Right, and then h…
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…thers. In his mind, nations can only be founded on a shared ethnicity, because “your kin have belonged to this people, on this land—to this nation in this place—and so they bind you to that people and place, creating a common volkgeist.” Wolfe’s argument for nationalism based on the shared ethnicity of a volk based in blood relations comes into focus when he explains his intended reader. “I am male, and am rooted ancestrally in Western Europe, and…
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…have asked what the term “evangelical” itself might be a metaphor for. Because regardless of the actual content of any specific definition of evangelicalism, the term is ultimately a social construction not unlike race, gender, and religion itself. And like all social constructions, evangelicalism’s meaning and use impacts how we understand and see the world. So, if we want to stop being surprised by the things that evangelicals do, it’s time to s…
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