Religion Dispatches
…and, to some extent, boring. It’s somewhat sophisticated and upper-middle class aesthetics. The sermons mention scholarship and Time Magazine as much as it mentions the Bible. Are northwest evangelical churches aligned with the religious right? With evangelicals, we never found a theocrat or a fascist. They’re very loyal to certain politicians, but very suspicious of politics. Some evangelical pastors were exceptionally critical of the politician…
Read More…ity, was fascinated by the religious role of the prophet. In what is now a classic text in the field, he dedicated an entire chapter to the question of what “prophetic” figures, from a wide variety of different religious traditions, from all around the world, actually had in common. The two features most commonly imagined by his predominately western audiences were the prophet as critic of institutional misbehavior and the prophet as predictor of…
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…be sure, this sort of nobility transcends both aristocratic arrogance and class conceit. Rather it is derived from humble commitment to serving others, reminding us all of our better human potential. And such a magisterial manner—to remix womanist theologian Katie Cannon—is demonstrated by an invisible yet tangible dignity, quiet yet powerful grace, and an unshouted though heart-thumping courage. This defines the towering life and lasting legacy…
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…e, the son of a fireman who struggled to make ends meet, effectively wages class warfare against the party insiders and libertarian “faux-cons” in Washington; he lashes out at the likes of National Review magazine and the Club for Growth, whom he calls “the silk-stocking crowd,” for looking down their noses at the blue collar “values voters” that Huckabee claims to represent. Two chapters are devoted to holding himself up as the representative of…
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…e opposition around them. The idea for the book came in 1998 when I took a class in the martial art of Aikido. There are no offensive moves in Aikido—no kicks or punches. There are only defensive moves—using the momentum of your attacker to disable them. I thought it served as an excellent metaphor for “spiritual self-defense” for LGBT Christians. I also came across the Bible verse that became central to the book, 1 Peter 3:15-16: “Always be ready…
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…suade you from reading Anthea Butler’s new book. Butler writes about lower class African-American Pentecostal women, a sadly understudied group. Focusing on the experience of sanctification, and the concomitant “dedication to both spiritual practices and temporal obedience,” Butler looks at how belief shaped these women’s understanding of self, community, and God, enabling them to “negotiate for and obtain power” in ways that defied expectations f…
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…ation [about] how he might accomplish his dream [bringing together working-class Catholics and evangelical Protestants] when he attended a political strategy session run by liberal operatives.” Although Weyrich hadn’t been invited to the confab—and to my knowledge he never revealed how he got there—Martin’s book quoted him as saying that “there before my eyes was revealed the modus operandi of the left:” They had all these different groups, includ…
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…the “wiped off the map” scandal: an entire country was reduced to a second-class leader who was reduced to a caricature who became a manifest casus belli. This is the same process of mistranslating a Middle Eastern country, recall, that led us into Iraq, and this reductive demonology is both representative and routine. Islamophobia has now become a socially acceptable subcategory of anti-Semitism. Fundamentalist and terrorist have become not fring…
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…the prayer or lead the prayer. But if students want to get together before class or after school or at recess or whenever to pray, they can. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I was hoping to write a book that would be attractive to all sorts of people who are interested in religion, law, politics, education, etc. Two particular groups I hope will read the book are atheists and other nonbelievers who don’t like religion, becaus…
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…nts, as normal aspects of youth culture are looked at through a magnifying class and distorted into symptoms of various pathologies. We see surprisingly few representations of mass locker searches or other abuses of power by American schools on television, so the moment in this week’s episode involving the locker search stood out to me. (It especially stood out given the news coverage this weekend of the Pennsylvania school which put spyware on co…
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