Religion Dispatches
…connection is new, and it has a subtly religious texture quite probably lost on most of us, especially the most aggressively secular heirs to the French Revolution. For the Olympics are deeply and abidingly religious. They always have been. First, then, to the historical facts. The Olympic Games were an essential part of a religious festival sponsored every four years at the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia. These Games lasted for more than a millenn…
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…has posed as a post-Modern thinker in the past. He is not; he is as anti-Modern as any of the other “enemies of reason” he first lambasted in Regensburg….
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…history of Jewish anti-Zionism, flattening all differences, accepting Zionist historiography as a given, and refusing to acknowledge any other motivations. Hamas threatens Jews, therefore it is antisemitism. SJP challenges Israel, so it too is antisemitic. It’s important to note that all of this is happening just as the ADL is bowing to pressure from a demonstratively antisemitic far-right. Recently, after tepidly pushing for Twitter to address ri…
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…ortant new book, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, one of the most striking features of a contemporary Religious Studies department is its easy acceptance of permanent pluralism as the necessary starting point for religious reflection. It’s easy to miss how new, how important, and how startling that starting point really is. Gone are the days when even conservative Christians dream of the eventual “conversion of the Jews” (I leave Bened…
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…ter? (To justify the alienation, oppression, or killing of a person, you must first dehumanize him.) And you can do all kinds of things to folks who don’t matter. But Dawkins was not quite as clever as he supposed. Writing for The Guardian, Nesrine Malik proposed that if we: insert pretty much any other group of people instead of “Muslims” and the statement would be true. Malik addressed Dawkins directly: You are comparing a specialised academic i…
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…sed. Although the Church can claim only 14 million members (an exaggerated statistic that counts all baptisms and births, but not the actual number of churchgoers), representatives of the religion—and representations of it—have managed to become fixtures in popular culture. I don’t have a complete explanation for this, but I would point first to the post-9/11 zeitgeist. In the last decade, there was a national and global debate about the place of…
Read More…ir of books about leaving homosexuality, whose new article over at the Christian Post rehashes all the lies the right-wing loves to spout about lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. Lest you think he was never gay in the first place, his first paragraph is used to prove his queer cred: “To those who suggest that I never was homosexual, my response is, ‘Does sleeping with over 1,000 men count?’” Actually, no, it doesn’t. Neither the num…
Read More…U.N. General Assembly, unsettled many in the audience by declaring: “We must stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians everywhere.” Power, who was present for those remarks, said that she was near enough to Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, to hear him mutter: “My God.” There have also been enormous victories for L.G.B.T. people in nations as different as Nepal andMalta over the last few years. This year alone, a popular referendum leg…
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…de anti-Christian. “Bottoms up,” she says, mimicking the motion. Weick’s most striking piece of evidence is the large, stylized letter M, which she claims is not one letter but the Hebrew letter Vav repeated three times. In Hebrew, letters have numerical values. The first letter, Alef, is also the number one; the second letter, Bet, is also the number two; etc. Vav, the sixth letter in the Hebrew alphabet and has the numerical value of six. Theref…
Read More…s, but the numbers [pdf] show that the sample actually skewed right. Of the 800 registered voters polled 38 percent were strong, weak, or independent-leaning Democrats with 41 percent identifying as strong, weak, or independent leaning Republicans. Conservatives outweighed liberals by 38 to 18 percent, and a full 74 percent of those polled identified as religious. Some 40 percent claimed the moniker of “born again,” and 33 percent said they attend…
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