Religion Dispatches
…holarship done this summer. Meanwhile, I try to hold it together to write a 800-word piece without crying and wanting to tear my hair out about the pain of my people. I’m not writing prophetic words to you anymore. You fix this shit. I’m done carrying the cross of America, its false promises of democracy and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black peo…
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…re, Louis de Bonald, Juan Donoso Cortés, Julius Evola, and Carl Schmitt, many of whom happen to be influential among the current crop of National Conservatives. What we commonly today refer to as illiberalism, and what we see emerging in predominantly Catholic European nations—most notably in Hungary, but also in Poland, Austria, France, and Italy (and in former Soviet Eastern Orthodox nations to the east)—is a response to many of the same dynamic…
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…e latter’s political turn, and he didn’t endorse Reagan in 1980, even as many of his peers were tripping over themselves to praise the candidate. Even in 2008 and 2012, Bakker didn’t make the election a major part of his pitch. But it seems that Bakker is more willing to play partisan games this time around. Even his wife, Lori, has come out in support of Trump, claiming that he’s the best candidate for women. Apocalyptic preaching isn’t new, and…
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…for myself, my family, and colleagues. So I’ve been trying to draft a short 800-word article for Religion Dispatches, as my attempt to make sense of this current moment, not because I chose this as an anthropological project, but here I am. Here I am listening to Trump’s transition team drop words like Muslim registry or that there is a precedent for internment camps in American history. The news that the KKK has been dropping their newsletter off…
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…s. “Evangelicals are so convinced that they have the absolute truth,” Bethany Grace argues, “that denying a child’s agency (even a grown child’s) or violating their bodily autonomy becomes easy for them to justify.” Spears has never identified as an #exvangelical and #FreeBritney is not about religion. But she is a former evangelical who has pushed against her controlling family, who has suffered immensely at the hands of evangelicals, and who is…
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…” language from FRC materials, they neglect to report that FRC president Tony Perkins was on the GOP committee that drafted that platform last year. In addition to several direct quotes from Sprigg that position same-sex attraction as a sinful choice that can be changed, the authors do not directly critique FRC’s framing of the harmful practice as benign-sounding “sexual reorientation therapy.” Although the article does include boilerplate stateme…
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…ctice, One of my most demanding coaches would say, “It’s time to run.” If anyone dared to ask, “How many laps?” or “How long?” his regular response was, “Until I get tired.” Those practices often meant painfully pushing through a wall of fatigue with no end in sight. My best coaches also relentlessly pointed out my individual shortcomings: tactical mistakes, sloppy play, insufficient leadership, and inadequate strategic compensation for my slight,…
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…st what the Founders feared, and just what our Constitution is meant to prevent—he divided the country along religious lines. Prayer at legislative sessions, which could easily be done by the truly pious legislators without a government microphone and resources, divides, cleaves, and sunders citizens along religious lines while pretending to unite us all. Any politician who truly wants to unite the country and wants to be inclusive of all citizens…
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…nd to a disaster, and the larger question remains why Osteen did not have any immediate response other than tweets of prayers. It may be that Osteen’s greatest asset is his ability to raise money. But then, why is raising money the best skill of the nation’s largest single-site church? Disaster relief and recovery work is predicated in an organization having existing skills and relationships to meet needs identified in a plan or in real time. The…
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…al, pre-Reformation context that’s important here, however. Because like many ancient liturgical practices retained in the East, full-immersion baptism became an important marker of Eastern Christian identity—particularly as increasingly numbers of Eastern Christians became the simultaneous targets of Western crusaders and Islamic conquerors. In this context, rigid adherence to liturgical customs became a means by which to assert and preserve iden…
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