Religion Dispatches
…ave that joy plus the thrill of a lifetime by stepping out of your offices tomorrow and helping to regroup the protesters who’ve been scattered by the police. Is money the best thing you have to leave your grandchildren? Is a killing in the market your best incentive for not killing yourself? Yes, some of your colleagues would laugh at you if you went out to protest. Marie Antoinette laughed too, until she found herself smiling up from the bottom…
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…ngs on the internet, to find anecdotes and bits of business I could incorporate into the novel. The book features a lot of personalities we’ve come to know, and have strong feelings about. At times you put them into very different kinds of roles. Maybe to flip the last question around, was there anything you were writing against? Did any books or authors turn you off? I wouldn’t say I was writing in opposition to anything so much as, again, lookin…
Read More…“They look at Trump,” he adds, “and see a man whose political positions, personal lifestyle, and bombastic rhetoric are not consistent with what they know their evangelical doctrine and theology teaches.” Here’s what to watch tomorrow: whether the audience at Values Voters will like Trump despite the views of evangelical “insiders,” and whether Trump will even try to demonstrate more fluency with their essential religious and political commitment…
Read More…nfreude about the conservative position being weak. The foot-stomping is strategic: an opportunity to portray themselves as victims strengthens the resolve of their followers. (See, there is no war on women, only an elitist war on conservatives!) You’ll see that resolve tomorrow. The high temperature in Washington is forecast to be 15 degrees. But I’d bet marchers come out in force, and you’ll see more than a few signs, and hear more than a few co…
Read More…t given what we’ve learned recently about religious realignments—declining numbers of Catholics, declining numbers of mainline Protestants, declining numbers of evangelicals in the 18- to 29-year-old age group, and increasing numbers of unaffiliated voters, and in particular, atheists and agnostics in the 18- to 29-year-old age group—it seems like a significant shift is underway. A recent Pew survey found that there are now equal numbers of white…
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…timate political discourse.” Making martyrs out of the jailed rioters is strategic. Martyrs are the exemplars of myth. They are the figures who embody the virtues that the community must emulate in order to create their ideal world. As the scholar of right-wing movements Daniel Koehler says, dying for the cause is “usually connected to a heroic fight to the death against ideological enemies, who in the end are responsible for the martyr’s death or…
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…or procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited by combining just a few digits. But since I’m a minimalist, I’d be quite content with a randomly ordered list. I’m confident that such a s…
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…issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have cell phones and be on the Internet? If they forbid them, that’s going to be very tough, and if they permit them, they’re going to introduce a huge new force into the world of child rearing and education. Religious education is going to have to make some drastic shifts. And it’ll be interesting to see how it works. This is still hinged on belief. This next generation can be Musli…
Read More…ce?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…
Read More…e?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…
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