Religion Dispatches
…feces smeared all over their floors and carpets, although I’m sure a great number of non-Muslims appreciate these artifacts from guests’ shoes. As mentioned previously, shoes are also used to discipline people. Belt-whuppins are difficult when men’s traditional garb does not include belts. Shoes/slippers/etc. are far more common. They are used to help “enlighten” insouciant, arrogant, oblivious, destructive, or otherwise socially maladjusted indiv…
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…ns are mythic—as with any religion, denomination, or sect—the mythic has always served a purpose: to generate usable history, helpful fiction. While Arnold J. Toynbee in the second volume of his landmark A Study of History describes an “abortive Far Western Christendom of the ‘Celtic Fringe,’” it’s more accurate to speak of an alternate Christianity, an idea more myth than reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any numb…
Read More…s shift in thinking are myriad and have only intensified since 2008 when a number of studies indicated that for the first time in US history, less than 50 percent of Americans classified themselves as “Christian.” Such shifts in church decline have been documented in the Church of England (UK) for decades. As reported by the Rev. Steve Hollinghurst, Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, the Sheffield Centre, Children’s Sunday school…
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…ss prevalent in the Orthodox community than anywhere else; but there are a number of peculiarities to Orthodox Jewish life that have made the reporting of abuse less common than in society at large. “I think the subject of abuse is probably the same in any religious community,” says Michael Salomon, a Long Island psychiatrist, who has just finished working on an as-yet-unpublished book about sexual abuse in the Orthodox world. “Different religions…
Read More…art, this is a religious debate. Some religious people think that the only way to fit in to a non-affirming religion is to change desires; others disagree asserting that desires rarely change much, and that living in accord with one’s religious beliefs is the proper aim. Change of orientation is not required for that. This “identity therapy” as Schumacher-Matos called it, is what the APA acknowledges as a proper way to recognize both the durabilit…
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…want to inform my readers, but I also want to challenge them. Hopefully in ways that would keep them engaged. I want readers to think about what goes into forming their own identities. If they have religious commitments, how does that theology play into their ideas about womanhood and manhood? I realize that many of my readers will be involved in academia in some way, and so I want them to think about how graduate school and higher education has w…
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…ou elaborate? JT: I don’t remember saying that. I do remember feeling that way, but I don’t remember placing myself onstage so much. It doesn’t necessarily matter if I’m onstage or not. I just find the communal experience of a rock concert, or any type of music performance, achieves a kind of transcendence that I associate with spirituality. It’s the closest thing to what I think people expect church to be like. Or maybe just what I’ve always thou…
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…nterviewed dozens of people for the book, some of whom thought PTL was the best thing they had ever been involved with and others who thought it was the worst. Jim and Tammy were nothing if not provocative. They put themselves at the center of some of the biggest divides in American religion and culture, which meant that they had no shortage of supporters and critics on either side, particularly with regard to the prosperity gospel. What alternati…
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…ge, is the privilege—which is to say the power—to deny racist intent and always be taken at one’s word. To always be able to clutch one’s pearls and appeal in Scarlett O’Hara’s mint julep-inflected tone, Dearest me, we never intended to… and be believed. And remain a symbol of beauty in the world no matter how many scars are on Prissy’s back. Preventing that ‘eureka moment’ Republican officials’ voter registration purges and restricting the possib…
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…ew essay from each editor that seeks to steward evangelicalism’s future by way of its past. Marsden and Noll argue that growing evangelical movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America prove that the faith has not totally lost its way, while Bebbington explores the recent history of British evangelicalism in order to highlight the peculiar nature of the American scene. Evangelicalism is now a global phenomenon, the editors conclude, and the troubl…
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