Religion Dispatches
…illiterate. They just don’t know the Word of God… Our parents’ generation knew the Word of God pretty well. My generation knew a little bit. The next generation knows none of it.” He may be right. Over the last several years it has become clear that American Christians know little about the Bible, and in 2010 Pew study atheists and agnostics performed better on a test of basic biblical knowledge than did Christians. It’s a problem. Christians shou…
Read More…a question of either/or: All these belong equally to Allah. It’s just a question of emphasis in our everyday, ordinary circumstances. It’s fairly self-evident that the idea of the beauty in Allah and Allah’s names really should incline us toward the Jamal names, since the word Jamal also means beauty. We need more of this divine beauty in our world. We are the agents of this. As Ghandi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world, and I…
Read More…t that Obama is a Muslim. He has said he’s not a Muslim. I take him at his word. People say he’s not born in the United States. I take it on the word that they properly vetted him before they swore him into office. I’m sure somebody had to look at his credentials. I’m not saying the President is a Muslim, never said he’s a Muslim. He says he’s a Christian. There is the issue of his birth. Under Shari’ah law, Islamic law, which is not legal in the…
Read More
…now we believe we should be the majority. I don’t think that’s ever been the biblical image. The saving remnant was the powerful idea in the Hebrew Scriptures and I think that continues in the Christian tradition. But, we’ve gotten triumphal. We turned Christianity into Christendom and we rule the world. We’ve seated kings and unseated kings. We got drunk with that kind of power and we forgot how to be a Christian. I hope we can recover that and I…
Read More
…s in the possible existence of such community that I think the hope of the world lies. I don’t think the world can make it without developed human beings, and a community supporting inner development. Meanwhile we’ve got a public culture that seems particularly contentious—debate as blood sport… People are attached to their opinions. Put simply, that means their fears and anxieties, their agitation, have been fueled or absorbed by an idea or conce…
Read More
…with Chris Matthews was his refusal to give any definition—either for the word “cult” or the word “Christian.” When Matthews recited Webster’s definition of a cult, Jeffress responded, “I believe more in a theological cult.” “Theological” in this case, appears to mean that it is entirely the prerogative of Protestant leaders what is and is not a cult. The power of this category lies solely in the fact that it is never defined. Curiously, Jeffress…
Read More
…y contemporary Satanists as well—along with occultists of all stripes. One rub, with a word like “witch,” as opposed to a word like “Presbyterian,” is that while Wicca and Satanism include many legally-recognized religious organizations, these are also extremely varied religions that, no matter what O’Donnell said on Politically Incorrect, do not require membership in anything like a “coven” in order to be official. In short, one is a witch when o…
Read More
…really a religion, either. There’s so much more in QAPD, but throughout it run themes of truth-telling and truth-avoidance, of ways to postpone the reality of one’s own difficult shadows, and of ways to admit and confront them. I can’t imagine the specifics of Bornstein’s dark places. Her gender evolution makes my own closet-to-light gay journey seem easy and banal, and her adventures in BDSM make my sex life look irredeemably vanilla. And I haven…
Read More
…ervers from other developed countries. Yet again, the reason is racism. As New York Times economic journalist Eduardo Porter points out in American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, the social supports created in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II were reserved exclusively for whites. When African Americans finally began to receive a paltry share, the programs that were seen to be benefiting African Americans came…
Read More
…mocked on Fox News and in other right-wing news media. Those who avow the truth of those words often find them thrown back in their faces whenever there is an act of terrorism committed by someone claiming Islam as their religion. So I’ve come to ignore these words. In fact, I even roll my eyes when anyone—naively, in my opinion—imagines it might somehow be useful to intone them yet again. But then I went to Amman, Jordan. I was there to participa…
Read More