Religion Dispatches
…way “Mormon musical” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who already produced a South Park episode about Mormonism. As a history professor, I also had numerous professional audiences in mind: • Environmental historians (who generally downplay religion and culture) • Utah historians (who too often underplay non-Mormons and native peoples in the state’s past) • Mormon historians (who too rarely engage with outside scholarly trends) • Local historians (wh…
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…idental casualty of the occupation of Japan and a Jesuit priest working in South America. Zooey (Zachary Martin Glass) was an aspiring actor in 1955, and the youngest daughter, Franny, was on leave from her college due to a spiritual malaise that brought her to the brink of a nervous breakdown. An intensely neurotic family. Also intensely brilliant, intensely attuned, and intensely committed to one another. What prompted Franny’s crisis was her in…
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…the graduate students in philosophy are Protestants, the famous school in South Bend, Indiana, may itself be the “Protestant Notre Dame.” Sloan’s vision, which he called Baylor 2012, was that his university would become a magnet for Christian scholars and a center—perhaps the center—for Protestant intellectual life. I was in Waco to write a feature article for Christianity Today, and I confess that I was intrigued by the audacity of Sloan’s plans…
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…Saturday fixed-gear bikes, the preferred mode of transportation, easily outnumber cars. South of the bridge, however, Bedford passes through Williamsburg’s bustling, Yiddish-speaking Satmar Hasidic community, largely descended from Eastern European Holocaust survivors. The men wear long, black jackets and big, black hats—even bigger ones on the Sabbath. Married women cover their heads with wigs. Children, sidecurls running down their faces, pour o…
Read More…opposing “Invictus.” Yes, the new movie about Nelson Mandela and the 1995 South African rugby team. They’re opposing that because, quote, “Mandela is nothing more than a communist-terrorist thug.” So, let’s review, conservative Christians demand that CPAC ditch the group that wants equality for a group of human beings – American taxpaying citizens – commonly known as gays and lesbians in marriage, housing, employment and the military – but has…
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…ears that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor, he would be deployed to the South Pacific, survive the war, and return home to raise a family. The war he liked to talk about (at least with me) was made up of football games with his friends, cribbage in the trenches, and the exotic surprises that Australia and the Philippines held for an Oregon farmboy. Of course, there was a good deal more to his war, but he didn’t care to talk about that. He was a…
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…mpanion kept 95.7% of it.) It’s possible this is part of a larger trend. A number of paragraphs down there’s mention of a long-delayed vote on the future of the denomination, which might lend credibility to the headline, but no details are given, so it’s not possible to evaluate the claim. Likewise, near the top of the story comes a paragraph with a quote from an RCA pastor about the financial difficulties this will create. Does he speak for the d…
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…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…
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…han reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any number of manifestations, from a community like Iona to the shelves of New Age bookstores. Bradley argues that although the idea of a historical Celtic Church may be an exercise in “wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all kinds of dreams about what should and might be,” it’s also a “vehicle through which people have chased their dreams… of deeper spir…
Read More…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…
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