Religion Dispatches
…t is almost invisible outside the academic world because the text is nearly 800 pages of dense, jargon-filled prose.” Rest assured, we do not need to read Taylor for ourselves because David Brooks can be trusted. His ongoing effort to distill for us the density of jargon is a choice well-honed. The result: a column that we have chosen to read (again, wisely) and, moreover, a readerly choice that becomes a sign to others and ourselves that we are a…
Read More…adrennial General Conference in Portland, Oregon. From May 10-20, more than 800 delegates will debate changes to church policy, including several that seek to lift longstanding bans on LGBT ministers and same-sex marriages. This is the first Methodist General Conference since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015. LGBT-affirming Methodists have failed to change church policy, with the denomination’s numerical strength now in the south –…
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…holarship done this summer. Meanwhile, I try to hold it together to write a 800-word piece without crying and wanting to tear my hair out about the pain of my people. I’m not writing prophetic words to you anymore. You fix this shit. I’m done carrying the cross of America, its false promises of democracy and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black peo…
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Jim Bakker misses his days as the head of Heritage USA—especially the amphitheater, the water park, and the train. On a recent episode of his TV show, the televangelist complained that the government had unjustly taken his Christian theme park away from him in 1989, after he was convicted of mail and wire fraud. But now things are looking up for Bakker. For the first time in years, he explained, “I can honestly say the vision I had fifty years ag…
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…re Caminada, he discovered that his parents and brother had died along with 800 other residents. Those who survived the flood moved “up the bayou” (as they still say in Lafourche Parish) to towns like Leeville and Golden Meadow. Today, what remains of Cheniere Caminada is a historic marker and a decaying cemetery. Beasts of the Southern Wild is not about saving the Bathtubs of Louisiana. It is about remembering them. “In a million years, when kids…
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…missionaries, to as many as 3,000 students a year. This semester, more than 800 students are registered in Professor Bott’s classes. (Eleven are registered for BYU’s African-American history course this semester.) Professors at BYU routinely find themselves having to address racist and sexist content taught in Bott’s classes, and many are outraged and embarrassed by his rogue remarks to the Washington Post, say sources at the university. “Dr. Bott…
Read MoreWhile sanctimonious conservatives and godless liberals alike await the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Hobby Lobby case, two more suits with serious church and state implications are quietly making their way through the system. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a group of “atheists, agnostics and skeptics” with a Scientology-esque fondness for litigation. Recently the FFRF has gone after the so-called “parsonage exemption,” which allow…
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…for myself, my family, and colleagues. So I’ve been trying to draft a short 800-word article for Religion Dispatches, as my attempt to make sense of this current moment, not because I chose this as an anthropological project, but here I am. Here I am listening to Trump’s transition team drop words like Muslim registry or that there is a precedent for internment camps in American history. The news that the KKK has been dropping their newsletter off…
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…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…
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…pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number of my students, raised in the Protestant-dominated United States (even Catholics and Jews have assimilated this definition), come to university thinking about religion; the two key components of which are “belief” and “God.” Religion is some cryptic interior, individual thing that exists in one’s own head, and is only understood in relation to a God. I don’t blame my…
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