Religion Dispatches
…on is that Tiger will look for a moral bailout soon. The rumor mill suggests that his handlers want him to sit down at the feet of the ultimate confessor, Mother Oprah. Or perhaps he can dictate a ghostwritten tome of repentance and rebirth, like Augustine of Hippo. Somehow, unlike Augustine, I don’t think Tiger will write, nor become a Bishop, unless he has hands laid on him by Bishop Magic Don Juan….
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…nd that is how Brooks sells himself and his politics—he is a choice engine—promoting choice, heralding the individual, and spreading the gospel far and wide, enabling more decisions to be executed by you by making your life easier—you do not have to read Taylor after all! And here I must offer a requisite disclosure: I have read A Secular Age and I am on record as a critic of Taylor’s framing of modernity. Although I am fearless when I talk trash…
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…rarest kind of celebrity: the academic kind. The French economist’s hefty tome helped propel the issue of income inequality to the forefront of our political debates. It should come as no surprise that he writes, at Le Monde, that inequality helps to explain the rise of ISIS, too. It’s been called “the most controversial theory behind the rise of ISIS,” though it’s not a ridiculous one. That honor belongs to Marco Rubio, who should get honored fo…
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…history stretches at least as far back as Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 tome The Principles of Scientific Management. In recent years, management techniques have expanded with quasi-religious flair, with Google serving as an exemplary case study. In the walls of the Googleplex, affable corporate elites tout the stress-relief benefits of Buddhist mindfulness practices even as they downplay the socio-economic impacts of the digital economy. Just…
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…ughly as non-historian Kevin Phillips tells it in his magisterial 600-page tome, The Cousins Wars (1999). Phillips notes that the fiercest American revolutionaries by far were New England members of the Dissenting churches (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists) whose forebears, in the preceding century, had battled the proto-Catholic Stuarts back in the Mother Country. In the English Civil War, these middle-class sectarians, mocked as “Roun…
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…ild’s grave, helping themselves to “some of the best things” they found in Indian dwellings. Later, and despite their official detente with the Wampanoags, they embarked on an unbroken rampage of expropriation and murder. Even pop historian Nathan Philbrick, who generally loves to throw a glowing halo over the exploits of white Americans, can’t escape telling the story of colonist treachery and aggression in his Mayflower tome (2006). Luring key w…
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…eorist with a long record of opposing same-sex marriage. In that scholarly tome, Gorsuch embraced Finnis’s view that promoting personal autonomy is an insufficient reason for government to permit what it might reasonably regard as poor choices, including assisted suicide. One key passage finds Gorsuch drawing an analogy that is, quite literally, paternalistic: Ruling out a ‘bad choice’ does not necessarily evince disrespect for the chooser, but fo…
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…policies from the left — as an “information source,” particularly his 1989 tome, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. But the list is otherwise populated by right-wing conspiracy theorists. In Secrets, Greider maintains: The conspiracy-minded critics exaggerated the importance of the Jekyll Island meeting, since it was hardly a secret that Wall Street wanted reform. But their suspicions were poetically accurate — the ba…
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…universe. Coincidentally, this novelistic career included the penning of a tome about a Carmelite nun (his 2001 Lying Awake)—a platform which, perhaps, allowed him to explore his seeker’s curiosity about the efficacy of prayer, or the constraints of divine will, from behind the mask of a middle-aged female monastic. But the spiritual balm that Salzman has worked up, to deal with the loss of faith in everyday life, is essentially non-theistic in it…
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…ies of the new LDS Church Handbook of Instructions, a two-volume, 400-page tome detailing Church doctrines, policies, and procedures (call it a Mormon Talmud) previously reserved only for local and regional Church leaders had been leaked on the Internet days before its official release at a special Saturday meeting satellite-broadcast from Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. Before last week, in a whole lifetime of Mormonism, I can only remembe…
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