Religion Dispatches
…good cheer and industrious politicking will pay off. It is certainly that spirit that keeps him logging many miles on the campaign trail. What I find interesting about Henrichsen, along with his fellow Democratic Mormons, is a willingness to take the principles of their beliefs and apply them in a completely different way from where the Mormon mainstream is politically. Henrichsen is happy about the Affordable Health Care act, which definitely sq…
Read More…o original sin; if one thing characterizes humanity, it’s forgetfulness, a spiritual condition that describes our tendency to miss the forest for the trees. God reminds us of our purpose in the world—to worship God, and to return back to Him—through prophets who address this characteristic of humankind. And while Muhammad is the last Prophet, he is not the Messiah. For Muslims, Jesus, the son of Mary, is the word of God, the spirit of God, and th…
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…rasp the paradox of how this music can exert such a powerful aesthetic and spiritual hold over him (and by extension, over others) when its host culture opposes his ethical values on so many fronts. Writing himself visibly and self-consciously into the study allows for an empathetic, nuanced, yet honest rhetorical stance reminiscent of Randall Balmer’s tone in Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. To mix religious metaphors, Harrison kicks a couple of sa…
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…with just 63 births per 1000 women of childbearing age (compared to 71 per 1000 in 1990). Americans used to be good at populating the planet, Douthat laments. “Our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), and our willingness to welcome immigrants” gave us a “demographic edge,” he writes (though Douthat’s own Republican party had a lot to say in the last year about exactl…
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…for public display does so well aware of the outrage that it may cause. In 1989 right-wing Christian senators, including Jesse Helms, attacked the work, and it was vandalized in 1997 while on display in Australia at the National Gallery of Victoria. Just last year a group Roman Catholic fundamentalists, bent on an anti-blasphemy campaign, took hammers to Piss Christ in Avignon. Innocence of Christians Tomorrow’s exhibition of the work has already…
Read More…. These presuppositions were deepened and strengthened by the events of the 1770s and 1780s, in which the notion of an American Israel throwing off oppression in order to take up its national mission settled ever more deeply into American public rhetoric. This link was only strengthened by the Revolutionary experience, the great evangelical revivals of the early nineteenth century, and the nation’s first movements westward. Nor did the jeremiad go…
Read More…w is it that a $5 million budget can buy you so little? And, who produces a 14-minute trailer? That’s just offensive. In Islam, the Qur’an is the literal word of God, and Muhammad represents the embodiment of those words of God. If you want to know what Islam is in text, go to the Qur’an; if you want to know what Islam is in action, study Muhammad’s life. That’s what Muslims do. They study it, debate it, and investigate it obsessively. Muslims bel…
Read More…r him was to reject the notion of a God who guides history. Sometime in the 1980s, I was leaving a restaurant with Rubenstein when he said quite casually that the Jewish people had rejected his theological view and they were right to do so. Before I could ask him why they were right, he headed off in another direction and I never saw him again. But he was surely right on one point. As Rabbi David Saperstein noted in the Washington Post (in his own…
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…species. He argues that because homosexuality is banned by the Torah, its “spiritual” harm is no different from the “emotional” harm done by a child molester; terminology unknown in halacha and surely disprovable in practice, if “spiritual” has any content whatsoever. And he claims that “the current culture” holds that the meaning of life is “the fulfillment of appetites”—which of course is absurd; my same-sex partnership is about love, holiness,…
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…pretive chasm” separating two versions of the same story; the first told in 1752 and the second in 1836. A monk is told to keep watch over the body of a girl whose family believes has recently died, but instead forces himself upon her sexually. In the morning, it turns out that she is not dead, but was just in a coma. In due course it becomes clear that she is pregnant. In the 1752 version it is assumed that the monk must have known she was alive,…
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