Religion Dispatches
…for me, the process of writing this book was a real eye-opener that demonstrated that even small, some might say, “marginal” religious groups are connected in so many ways to so many other groups, crossing lines of space, race, and time. It led me to rethink the utility of the “marginal” and to discover just how rich those religions are as a way of understanding the world and much larger movements, religious, cultural, political, and otherwise. Di…
Read More…believe we live this life according to our own will and trust in the Lord. I just don’t get the idea that unless I get a specific, personal, one-on-one message, then I cannot do the best I can with what God has given me. But then, as all the great Muslim thinkers conclude at the end of their writings: Allah knows best….
Read More…s). He even managed to joke about Sarah Palin’s bus tour antics being “the best thing that could happen” to his candidacy. Right now, Mitt Romney’s greatest problem appears to be Republican Party itself. After opportunistically handing the reins to Tea Partiers and evangelical conservatives to capitalize on unbridled rage against the nation’s first African-American president, the GOP has now cultivated a base most interested in crusading against s…
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…kewise be quite useful to keep Americans thinking that God still loves us best despite the daily evidence of falling fortunes. I should be clear that I think the admirable aspects of the white American story should certainly be taught. In my youth I taught an AP class in American literature in relation to 19th century American history. Were I teaching that same class today, I would have no difficulty inviting my students to think of the consti…
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…its downfall. Scientific inquiry has to divorce itself from what makes the best story, and science writers, myself included, are in the business of making science compelling by telling stories. It’s true: we report scientific findings in a narrative form. One important point: science is filled with conditionals and religious literature is not. Any religious literature, any revealed scripture, doesn’t have lots of mights and coulds and maybes and f…
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…is as Christianity does The ongoing influence of Gothard’s theology might best be illustrated in the figure of Alex Harris, the son of Gregg Harris, one of the key architects of the U.S. homeschooling movement in the 1980s and the brother of Joshua Harris, whose 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye made waves in American evangelical purity culture. Alex Harris—a lawyer who has clerked for both Justice Anthony Kennedy and then-Judge Neil Gorsuch—twee…
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…the House chamber were any judge, the heart of the matter is that, in the best Niebuhrian “realist” fashion, a “contentious and frustrating and messy democracy” is proving its superiority to every other nation with its domestic “civility,” while at the same time sending its military forces to fend off a shadowy and (let’s be honest now) apparently rather ineffectual foreign threat. Whether the president truly believes his Niebuhrian rhetoric no…
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…s in America because of sanctuary cities. This incendiary statement is, at best, unproven. At worst, it is a willful distortion of the best research and data available. Crime rates among undocumented immigrants are notoriously difficult to track accurately, in part for the reason Clarke recognized. But the allegation that sanctuary cities are “havens” for violence is patently false. There is simply no evidence to suggest that cities that decline t…
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…publicly renounced reparative therapy, they’re still preaching that “God’s best” for gays and lesbians is celibacy and some still believe that God can change sexual orientation over time. What’s your response? It’s kind of a doublespeak. They want to be against what is publicly recognized as the most damaging sort of thing out there. But, they talk out of the other side of their mouth and support this. I think some of them are confused, but I thin…
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…ly rejected the claim that allowing trans folks to use the facilities that best match their gender identity leads to any increase in reports of harassment or assault in such spaces. It just doesn’t work that way. In fact, if anyone has anything to fear it should be transgender people since they’re actually more likely than their cisgender peers to be harassed and assaulted in sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. And with high-pro…
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