Religion Dispatches
…on the existence of the light bulb, they still might not change it, to keep from alienating those who might use other forms of light. If you’re smiling as loudly as you can, you might just be an Episcopalian….
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…at mock liberal Buddhism and interweave reflections on Buddhist texts with misogyny, antisemitism, and the celebration of Asian Buddhist monastic extremists such as U Wirathu who have incited violence against Muslims. For those readers who associate Buddhism with progressive liberal values, or hold an ahistorical reading of the tradition as apolitical, the white backlash to racial justice will be a surprise. As within all religious traditions, how…
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…most of the sounds), the American Religious Sounds Project aims “to offer new insights into the complex dynamics of religious pluralism in the United States.” The co-directors of this project, Amy DeRogatis of MSU and Isaac Weiner of OSU, suggest that we can understand religion and religious diversity differently “by listening for it,” but it is the field researchers who listen for while we, the audience, presented with online audio files, listen…
Read More…ease is due to the debates over immigration reform; but even factoring that in, Hispanic churches are becoming more politically active. The number of congregations might be few, but they may also be larger communities, representing a substantial number of people. In any case, the trend will only continue as Hispanics continue to grow as a part of the US population. Which brings us around at last to the joke in the headline: Can the religious left…
Read More…ch to immigration reform signed by state leaders in 2010 and hailed by the New York Times as a model—and one of its key institutional backers, the LDS Church. The LDS Church helped influence the compact design and announced its support in a formal statement issued in November 2010, citing particular concern for “love for neighbors, family cohesion, and the observance of just and enforceable laws.” Pearce represents an ethnocentric red-state Rocky…
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…lly speaking, vegetables get all the glory,” Ariel Kaminer lamented in the New York Times, playing the role of the paper’s esteemed Ethicist. And so, in an attempt to buck this trend the paper launched an essay contest in March of this year: in search of the ethical argument for meat. Essays were judged by a star-studded panel that included vocal vegetarians like Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer as well as more cautiously omnivorous foodies s…
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…est heretic. Nicholas Dawidoff’s profile of the brilliant physicist in the New York Times Magazine illuminates a man who has always sought to subvert scientific consensus—most recently in denying the dangers of climate change and CO2 emissions. The story’s title, “The Civil Heretic,” signals the ghost of religion hanging in the background. It is the “secular religion of environmentalism” that Dyson opposes. A religion that holds the plant itself s…
Read More…disdain or distaste for polygamy. The most glaring example: last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, wherein reviewer Eric Weinberger feels obliged to denounce polygamy as a “culturally alien and abhorrent practice” and concludes by wishing that Brady had shown “a little less respect” for his protagonist Golden Richards and his four wives. Huh? I wrote Brady and asked him for his reaction: [Weinberger] thinks that I’m not clear-eyed or cr…
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…or Yom Kippur was Tuesday and Wednesday. We are saturated with religion in New York City, with a great rising. And yes, alternate side of the street parking was suspended all week. Like my skirt, parking is a kind of sacramental preoccupation for those of us hungry for larger epiphanies. Times Square has made a statue for the Pope, allowing kitsch to capture his kinetic spiritual power. The long meanings of the Pope’s visit remains to be seen. The…
Read More…h print edition. Jennifer Schuessler, who covers the academic beat for the New York Times, discusses the resurgence of scholarship on people long since thought to have been dead and passed from the scene: dead, (mostly) white, mainstream/liberal/mainline/ecumenical Protestants. In assessing the roots of a surge of work on 20th-century liberal Protestantism, including works such as Matt Hedstrom’s The Rise of Liberal Religion, Jill Gill’s Embattle…
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