Religion Dispatches
…. Black men and women are still dead, Police are still jacking us up and shooting black people for minor infractions, and white Americans are still yelling, “We want to take our country back.” I’m tired of giving you the fiery words of a prophet. I was right in what I wrote three years ago: America is reaping the bitter fruits of the racist, white supremacist crap it has sown. What’s next? Hell if I know. I can hazard a guess: the streets this sum…
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…ly) Catholic perspective. The publication is intellectually very serious—proof that ideas and cosmologies matter in politics. Alongside the Federalist Society, it’s difficult to imagine a more important repository of the intellectual source code of religious and cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-yea…
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…n 1989, after he was convicted of mail and wire fraud. But now things are looking up for Bakker. For the first time in years, he explained, “I can honestly say the vision I had fifty years ago is now. God said he’s going to restore what the cankerworm has eaten.” The evidence? Bakker is building again. His new complex in rural Missouri, called Morningside, includes RV parking, cottages for rent, cottages for sale, a home for unwed pregnant women,…
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…ican Anthropological Association. In an interview with the Guardian, Homa Hoodfar, a Canadian-Iranian anthropologist, said she survived her time in an Iranian prison by studying her captors. She would lie on the floor and use the end of her toothbrush to scratch observations on the walls. Through participant observation at a prison, Hoodfar wrote fieldnotes about the interrogations she endured and conversations with other prisoners. When the inter…
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…erry, who was once a Contemporary Christian Music artist, Spears has deep roots in white American evangelicalism. Born and raised in the Bible Belt and surrounded by conservative evangelical Protestants, Spears grew up Southern Baptist and spent her childhood performing in Baptist choirs. For her very first stage performance, when she was five years old, she sang “What Child Is This” at her kindergarten graduation. Spears was actually a standard-b…
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…eteran journalists Brian Ross and Brian Epstein report on the celebratory mood among advocates of “gay conversion therapy,” who are “heartened” by the new administration’s deference to “religious freedom” claims. They begin by explaining that conversion therapy, sometimes called “reparative therapy” or “sexual orientation change efforts,” is indeed “long-discredited.” But then they offer what amounts to an 800-word platform to the Family Research…
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…fort to white people. This bill, which reads like a scene from 1984, is a doozy. You can, and should, read the full text of it here. The bill purports to “protect individual freedoms and prevent discrimination in the workplace and in public schools.” But it then proceeds to define “individual freedoms” and “discrimination” in ways that are unrecognizable to the plain, historic meaning of those words. Here’s a quick tour. The bill notes that the St…
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…s. Amen, and awoman.” The prayer might have been written by Saul Bellow’s Good Intentions Paving Company. But good intentions matter little when the underlying act is improper. Cleaver is an ordained minister and U.S. Representative—combining those two roles is never a good idea. Deep down, Cleaver seems to have been attempting inclusion and humor, but by mixing religion and government, he angered nearly everyone. Theologically, objections abound,…
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Twitter was outraged Monday. Megachurch Pastor Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, housed in a former basketball arena, looked to be dry and quiet, even as thousands of Houstonians were seeking shelter from Hurricane Harvey. “Joel Osteen” started to trend on Twitter with comments about the hypocrisy of the prominent Prosperity Gospel preacher, who tweeted out that he and his wife were praying for Houston, while appearing not to do anything to address…
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…ationship between the West and the Christian East makes it difficult to see, highlighting how limited and reductive the conversation around decolonization and multiculturalism truly is. Because in the ironically binary world that these discourses create, there’s little room for whatever traditionally Orthodox cultures are: European, but not Western; Christian, but not Western. It makes us unable to see that when we hijack a tragedy to assert our c…
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