Religion Dispatches
…s many members of its own species. The complicity of most churches in Nazi Germany presents a poor argument that the churches have either the needed vision or moral courage to stand up to environments of government-manufactured fear. The good news here may come from our evolutionary sciences. Primatologist Frans De Waal is one of the most respected and influential ethologists writing today whose well-documented optimism is carried in some of his e…
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…wake up.” Lifting the Fog of History Schmitz was one of the first women in Germany to earn a PhD from the prestigious Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1935, she authored a secret and anonymous call to Christian conscience about the church’s responsibility to the Jews. The anonymity was prudent, because authorship of “On the Predicament of the German non-Aryans” could have landed her in a concentration camp. The same fate would have befallen any c…
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…ogy of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popular. In an odd parallel, Benedict’s view of the Church resembles the ecclesiology of the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who argued that the Christian church should focus on creating a community of character that stric…
Read More…he delict of sexual abuse of minors.” Theologian Doris Wagner-Reisinger of Germany accused Mr. Geissler of trying to kiss her in the confessional in 2009; she was told that he had admitted it and been punished. That was several years ago, and he has been on the loose and employed in the very office dedicated to deal with similar incidents. It is hard to make up these cases. Another jaw dropper of late is a report that Argentine Archbishop Gustavo…
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…rching Quiverfull, I read many fundamentalists who took that charge seriously enough to counter it, and tell women that there was no such thing as freedom, but only slavery to sin or to God. Koonz’s book is a meticulous history of women during wartime Germany—the resurgence of patriarchal gender roles, their movements for and against these roles, the politicking of Germany’s versions of Phyllis Schlafly, angling for power with male leaders as they…
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…das. Most of the time, these theories were overtly anti-Semitic, with Nazi Germany and its obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism” serving as the starkest example of the consequences of these theories—for Jews and for the world. Today, it is can no longer be doubted that from San Diego and Pittsburgh to Charlottesville, Virginia, and the pages of Breitbart, anti-Semitism is resurgent in the Trump era. But how it operates—and why it’s on the rise—can be…
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…ile President Franklin Roosevelt had harsh words for Hitler’s treatment of Germany’s Jewish population, his words alone were little comfort to those who were fighting for their very survival, and that of their families. The United States even put pressure on European countries not to take them in, because they supposedly posed an imminent threat to their national security. This tragic episode took place amidst charges that many Jewish asylum-seeke…
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…alent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” In Germany, his positions have been compared to the Nazis, and his lectures have been disrupted all over the world by groups representing the handicapped. According to my friend Angela Creager (one of Singer’s colleagues and a professor of the history of science at Princeton), Singer is a kind man moved by compassion. Nevertheless, he seems not to understand how his ideas stri…
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…nt, is also treasurer of the Mississippi Tea Party. MFIRE’s tagline is “To Promote and Preserve National Sovereignty.” In a recent press release, Hunt said, “We can’t continue to allow the Mexican drug lords, human traffickers, and terrorists organizations to enter our country at will or for illegal aliens to continue to take jobs badly needed in our state and across the nation.” Promoting white nativist views may put AFA at odds with its own alli…
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…ant distinction between America and Europe on this question. Many youth in Germany and Poland have taken a strong interest in Jewish culture, music, and religion in the past decade or so. Whether this is a product of guilt or, as she prefers, collective shame, what is interesting is that Europe’s renewed interest in (its) Jews and Judaism more generally does not translate into a reflexive support of Israel. This, I think, is a healthier attitude t…
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