Religion Dispatches
…wise the atheists who delivered the opening prayer at the infamous Greece, New York, town meeting, after courts ruled that such prayer was somehow legal. The fact that it was atheist prayer seemed meant to “prove a point,” and that point, to me, was that New Atheists have become just another religious sect, and they should get off their high horse. (Note: atheists get REALLY MAD when you say this.) But now that SCOTUS has ushered in a new religiou…
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…hurch has become much more volatile. There are a lot of people reading the New York Times op-ed page. And that’s unfortunate, because a lot of people just read the same thing. I lament that, because most people who care about Catholic stuff read from a niche. Being able to make sense of opposing views is something we’re less used to. I include myself in this. What is the role of a public theologian such as yourself in our increasingly secular soci…
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…toward the Church of England. “You wouldn’t have preferred [the bishop of] York, would you?” Of course, that was not my thinking at all—Twitter’s mere 140 characters creates a certain barrier to nuance. The “almost all the candidates were middle-aged and white” bit was more to the point, Bishop of York Dr. Sentamu being the “only” non-white Church of England bishop who made up the “almost.” The tweeter doubled down on in a follow-up message: “but…
Read More…searching, but at the weekend Mike and I had a trip to Leeds and chose two new rings to mark this new milestone in our lives together “I have written to the Archbishop, and informed him of our intentions, and he will withdraw my PTO, and my ministry as a reader will come to an abrupt end.” Venezuela: First trans candidate for Congress; Evangelicals press Socialist Party on gay rights According to a Reuters report last Saturday, “The first transgen…
Read More…has been to reach out to all young people and have a positive influence.” York said that the Twin Cities-based Scout council, one of the nation’s largest, will continue to follow a 12-year-old “inclusive leadership selection” practice. “Every council is reflective of their community,” he said. Which makes sense. Large organizations express their identity differently in different places. No matter how hard you try (or don’t try) to enforce a top-d…
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…ly and forcefully than Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s father and former governor of New York.) Second, if support for reproductive rights disqualifies a Catholic politician from receiving the sacrament because abortion violates church teaching, why shouldn’t that disqualification also apply to other politicians who support policies that contradict church teaching? The Vatican opposes capital punishment, for example, and John Paul II adamantly opposed the U…
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…iscussion of religion and politics found in the pages of The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media of comparable reach and influence. This earlier history is easy to ignore since the problematic features of evangelical Protestantism were much less consequential until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Two portentous, virtually simultaneous developments changed that. First, evangelical Protestantism wa…
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…e founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, took to the New Yorker to offer a rose-tinted historical gloss to the turmoil and looks to a multicultural future. First, Keller couches the contestation surrounding the term “evangelical,” and who and what it signifies, as a problem of public perception rather than an opportunity for reflection and change. Rather than acknowledge that there may be good reasons for white conservative e…
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…lout behind the Tawana Bradley incident in 1987, Sharpton equated the then-New York state attorney general to Hitler. However, as blacks have ascended the political ladder in post-civil rights years, or when black clergy have been granted a seat at the municipal table, sometimes that scathing rhetoric has been tempered for fear of biting the hand that feeds you. What has gotten lost and has been conveniently forgotten in the maelstrom of culture w…
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…that account. To mark this week when Lincoln’s Birthday is celebrated, The New York Times Book Review splashed a sketch of the stovepiped Great One on its cover and featured reviews by Jill Lepore and Drew Gilpin Faust (Fight Fiercely, Harvard!) of three new Lincoln books. Lepore’s review of Martha Hodes’ Mourning Lincoln and Richard Wightman Fox’s Lincoln’s Body is exceptionally penetrating. My thinking here about Lincoln’s religious significance…
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