Religion Dispatches
…which shows some growth in many areas of the Church worldwide, but includes this: The number of women in religious orders continued its downward trend. The total of 702, 529 temporarily and permanently professed sisters and nuns in 2012 was a 1.5 per cent decrease from the previous year and a 5.9 per cent fall since 2007….
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…we all queerer in grad school? DOS: [Humoring me] Totally. But I do primarily rely on queer of color theorists to devise the theory of racialization that I offer in Wild Experiment—those thinkers are very much at the foreground of the idea of racialized reason. MPG: And this question of rationality v. irrationality that overarches your project is deeply gendered, of course. Say, where is gender in this project? DOS: I took a grad seminar with Lind…
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…Which brings us to the dominion verse itself, which God addresses exclusively to the newly formed humans. Here it is in the familiar King James Version translation: “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (1:28). Let’s take it apart. Note that three of the five things humans are told to do—“be fruitful,” “m…
Read More…would be a bit more impressed, however, if proceeds of the sales of the Poverty and Justice Bible, or even a portion of the proceeds, were going to help the poor and oppressed. ABS does, indeed, have a grant program they say helps places like Habitat for Humanity and the Salvation army, but nothing seems to be directly going to help the needy from this new Bible. I hope this Bible will spur some to action to help the needy, but for now, it seems…
Read More…t old “separation of church and state” thing that conservatives trot out—only when they need it—certainly gets shredded in this law. Conservative Christians are the first to make it clear that the government has no business telling them whom they can and cannot marry, yet at the first available opportunity, they create laws declaring just that. To add insult to injury, the law also carries misdemeanor charges for any same-sex couples who attempt t…
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…se global movements, and if a certain sort of religion seemed to be so indubitably and dramatically “back” in 1979, then the question of what these trends meant for the future could no longer be avoided. Juergensmeyer demonstrated the ways in which such movements offered a coherent and attractive alternative to the reigning paradigms of ethnic or civic nationalism; religious nationalism, in his view, long a staple of resistance against various for…
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…he most disturbing actors in contemporary politics. All of this is definitely worth drawing out. More generally, I think there’s an ongoing need for journalists to take conspiratorial mindsets seriously when reporting on religion. That’s not a criticism of Jenkins—hardly any reporters engage this difficult terrain. Conspiracy thinking and faith aren’t necessarily identical, or even equivalent. But they come from the same spaces in our personalitie…
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…them through the doors of the right kind of church, you’ll introduce them bit by bit into the harsher aspects of your theology (and its attendant politics), by which point they’ll be too invested to leave. (For a detailed firsthand account of how this strategy works by an adult convert to evangelicalism who is now an exvangelical, as someone who received a review copy, I highly recommend Gloria Beth Amodeo’s new book God’s Ex-Girlfriend: A Memoir…
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…e essential truths and that what the Veda said first, Jesus said conclusively. The inhabitants of the Age of Aquarius just so happen to be especially ready for the revelation. There is a surprising degree of self-congratulation and a brash spiritual self-confidence in this claim, which is another important feature of the New Age landscape to keep in mind, especially in its early 20th-century incarnation, but also later, when it leapfrogged two wor…
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…ituality, angels offered a promising means of intercession with the seemingly brutal heavenly realms. Second, I would suggest that much of the evangelical fascination with angels grew out of the interest in the concept of “spiritual warfare,” angels fighting by the side of human beings. This image of the spiritual life as warfare was encouraged by the growth of fantasy literature in the 1960s and 70s. In 1965, the first paperback edition of Tolkie…
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