Religion Dispatches
…cape from the Text. Derrida said there is nothing outside the text. He was wrong. What looks like void is wilderness, and scripture holds out the hope that we don’t have to work on Pharoah’s farm no more, that if we abandon structure and head out into that chaos, somewhere on the other side of that void is the promised land of true vision. This is the heart of the American literature of the Wilderness. The feminists so dominant in academia these d…
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…x Faith, perhaps even to betray Christ himself. To be clear, Kirill is not wrong that Ukrainians are more divided on Mazepa’s legacy. Polling shows that about a third of Ukrainans see him as a “man who fought for Ukraine’s independence,” while nearly a quarter see him as a traitor. And the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, wouldn’t rule out the idea that his family was connected to the former Hetman. He even had a statue of him built…
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…l ethic will keep winning, that whitemanism will succeed in preserving the wrong kind of American exceptionalism, and that this same resurgent whitemanism—which has always had strong elements of Freud’s death drive (Todestrieb) baked into it—will keep us from averting the worst possible environmental apocalypse. Another way to put this: The times, they aren’t a-changin’. And time itself is very short. UPDATE: Is a Fixation on Race Betraying th…
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…hand that enables them to defend themselves against charges that they are wrongly smearing all American Muslims with a broad brush. It’s not the American Muslims themselves who are radical, they insist, it’s American Muslim organizations and mosques in America that are carrying out this secret plot in which ordinary American Muslims are either unwitting dupes or victims. Yet they frequently slip from that defensive posture and make broad statemen…
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…disappearing tradition is stoked primarily by demographics. Indian census numbers show that the percentage of those identifying as Hindus dipped below 80 percent for the first time. But while there is much talk about a rising Muslim population, the actual spikes have come among Christians, where the mass conversion of tribal groups and Dalits has been part of a sustained and systematic effort of “Great Commission” movements such as the Joshua Pro…
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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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…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…
Read More…conflict and politics in a Muslim majority nation.” The abstract: While a number of investigations have examined how gay Muslim men view homosexuality in relation to religious Western homophobia, this research constitutes the first account of the experiences of self-identified gay men living in an African, Muslim nation, where same-sex sex is both illegal and actively persecuted. We interviewed 28 gay men living in Tunisia in order to understand…
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…udied, and at least 12 were formally approved as of 2008—according to most numbers (although even a simple count of “official” sites is hard to obtain), Our Lady of Good Help is the 13th. Pope Benedict XVI recently called for more moderation in approving such sites, but any new regulations did not fall into place in time to stop Bishop Ricken from pushing Adele Brise into the international spotlight. Benedict probably doesn’t have to worry about A…
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…ople who aren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal sch…
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