Religion Dispatches
…s that most other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married….
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…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…
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…they should be attending religious services. And here again, thinking this way can privilege certain ways of being religious: What if prayer is silent or ongoing in your practice, or what if there is no house of worship? And there is no straight line between quantity of practice and self-identified quality of religiosity. What if I just really love Catholic Mass although my family is Jewish? What if the more I pray the more I doubt? (Do you know a…
Read More…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…
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…the many differences between various Jewish and Christian sects in how to number and interpret these different sets of commandments. All of this I explain in my book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Seemingly small differences are magnified because Christianity has historically claimed to possess ultimate truth, so any deviation from an absolute truth is significant. Minor variations are further magnified by, as James…
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…ditional readings of the Torah, it even goes back to God himself. Indeed a number of biblical books go beyond merely denouncing or delegitimizing Israel’s “right to exist.” At the time of the original covenant, God threatens that, if Israel disobeys His teaching, the people of Israel will “flee in defeat before your enemies; you may make a unified stand against them but you will run away in every direction; and you will become a horror to all the…
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…ics referring, for example, to Revelation 22:19’s injunction not to “take away from the words of the book of this prophecy.” One comment from the blogosphere said of the CBP, “Let them rewrite the Bible. It is deemed a sin to add or take away from the Good Book, so those wanting to rewrite will find their own brimstone and hellfire soon enough.” In their interpretive procedures and principles, however, participants in the CBP do not reject biblica…
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…mp retweeted a curious meme of himself playing the violin back in March, a number of critics mocked him for acknowledging that he is like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns—a fiery critique of him golfing while numerous Americans, especially poor and racially marginalized Americans—died from COVID-19. Reed couldn’t associate Trump with a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he opted for Tiberius instead. This is an undeniable historical er…
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…eaningfully respond to urban desperation and desolation, (certainly in any way prefiguring the strategic role envisioned within oft-noted endtimes scenarios), it will necessitate a willingness on the part of churches to be present, engaged, and steadfast in contexts where the poor have been left to struggle. Historian Randy Sparks recounts a range of ways New Orleans’ clergy and congregations mobilized on behalf of New Orleans residents during and…
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…But reading the book made it clear that Christian weight loss was a great way to investigate the moral and religious construction of fatness. And the comparison with ex-gay ministries seemed like a productive way to explore how certain bodies and bodily desires become morally charged, how people try to change them, and what happens when those bodies and desires prove resistant to change. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Th…
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