Religion Dispatches
…he makes a lot of his one big win, when, late last year, he predicted that Best Buy would jump from $11 a share to $40. Currently Best Buy is trading at around $34—not quite Hyman’s prediction, but still an impressive jump. Beyond that it’s difficult to say, though Hyman seems to have had a lot of success as an investment advisor. He claims to have more than 57,000 subscribers to his “Ultimate Wealth Report” (that’s around $2.68m) and he’s been pe…
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…r point was that art may not survive democracy. Borders are necessary. Our best art and our best ideas ought to be kept out of reach if they’re to do any real work in the world. As it goes with art, so it is with religion. Give your beliefs a tough shell or skin and the uninvested (some say undeserving) will pass it by. Thick skin protects what’s inside by sometimes repulsing even those willing to give it a try. Thin-skinned ideas on the other han…
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…” appears 11 times in the party’s platform; “religion” or “religious” nine times; “church” two times; and “clergy” one time. RD’s Peter Montgomery updated the score in these pages yesterday. Consultant Burns Strider, who largely makes his living helping Democrats talk the talk, made the whole affair in Charlotte sound like one big prayer meeting. After noting that he’s “not into word counts,” Strider still found it necessary to remind readers tha…
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…ide of the marital bond, and to promote the institution of marriage as the best environment for children. The article on religion is noteworthy for affirming a positive “Right to a Religion”—in contrast to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, the standard in accepted international instruments. Here again, the Declaration cites the UDHR but omits its crucial inclusion of the “freedom to change” belief and highlights “the right of parents t…
Read More…mns” or deploy “‘God and country’ talk borrowed from a 1980s-era television evangelist.” Trump may have inadvertently taken Moore’s advice. He appears to know no hymns and mimics only televangelists’ love of money. But he may have, in the process, won over a not insignificant number of evangelicals, even with two preachers’ sons (Ted Cruz and Scott Walker), one preacher (Mike Huckabee), and one longtime evangelical hero (Ben Carson) in the race. H…
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…Perry to positively view her own deconversion. However much the song’s sentiments are now indistinguishable from a regnant Oprah-esque credo, “Firework” was inspired by a very particular passage from Kerouac’s On The Road about people who are “mad to live” and “burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” In Katy Perry’s pyrotechnic trajectory, she didn’t lose religion; she found herself, and that true self includes a self-chosen gospel that she now…
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…ocabularies.” He said that morality is merely “the language games of one’s time.” Rorty was the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, a theologian, Baptist minister, and leader in what was called the Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So Rorty’s nihilism is nihilism with a twist of religious awareness. Rorty is clear about his legacy from the Social Gospel/theological liberalism of his grandfather. Maybe that’…
Read More…ideological collective. I don’t mean any picayune kind of ideology. In the time of the Prophet Muhammad, there was a shift from tribal affiliations or extended family or asabiyah, to one which focused instead on the shared ideology of witness. The witness is the first pillar of Islam: I bear witness that there is only one God and Muhammad is His prophet. That witness only and the principled ideology of tawhid. I don’t know how long it took before…
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…now is this: how can we wage this battle even more effectively? How can we best shield ourselves from the inevitable onslaughts of predatory journalists, readers, and politicians who prefer “fake news” over evidence-based, critical discussions on religion and society? How can we more fully reap the rewards of living dangerously? It is not about policing our tone or maintaining respectability. On the contrary, I beg public intellectuals: do not san…
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…As much as Christians would like to proclaim God’s sovereign majesty leading the unchanging gospel through the darkness of a fallen world, the truth is, the church, like any human institution, changes and adapts to present circumstances, sometimes better than others. Given the magnitude of the changes being currently experienced in American society, the best hope for white American Christianity might be to just leave it all behind, and wait to se…
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