Religion Dispatches
…the possibility that the United States as a nation has not lived up to the best of its democratic ideals, has not represented in its internal practices and foreign policies the commitment to freedom that fuels its rhetoric. And, while we’re at it, we might throw into the mix some attention to our materialism and its awkward and distorting presentation. There is something useful in examining the policies and practices of our nation and demanding th…
Read More…t simplicity and broad comparative reach. The prophet, Weber suggested, is best defined as the unique bearer of charisma. No sooner had Weber offered his “unified theory” of the prophet than he subdivided the essential concept again, noting that there were two very different kinds of charisma with which he had to deal. On the one hand, there is the charisma of personality; on the other, there is the charisma of office. The two forms rarely, if eve…
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…ssly. We can disagree all day long about whether taxing the wealthy is the best way to heal the economy or which direction the toilet paper roll should go and still be the best of friends. But when you speak and act in ways that seek to limit the civil liberties, increase the risk of discrimination and violence, and damage the psychological and spiritual well-being of me and people like me as a group, you are not being loving. You are not being co…
Read More…his is very much a primetime soap opera. The show’s Wikipedia page puts it best: “romantic entanglement will occur.” Come for the spacefaring science, stay for the melodrama. (Or is it the other way around?) But Defying Gravity isn’t just concerned with the characters’ “entaglements.” As in the work of Philip K. Dick, our earthborn religion is a concern as well, particularly in the pilot episode (available on Hulu through September 7th). As the sh…
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…Dawkins likes to put it, a “blind watchmaker.” Dawkins’ books have become bestsellers in the United States and Britain, and his vision of human evolution (or more precisely, the vision of it that he popularized from the work of such preeminent late-twentieth-century biologists as William Hamilton and E.O. Wilson) is shared by many evolutionary biologists today. Humans, like all living organisms, “are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly progr…
Read More…ates, and the men who treat their wives and daughters like chattel—are the best examples of the doctrine in practice.” This is the same man who says, about Islam, “All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.” Often his arguments seem to be poor attempts to plagiarize from the protocols of the elders of neo-conservatism. But even Bernard Lewis, one of the leading defenders of t…
Read More…long as those needs get the response they deserve. As it happens, even the best of leaders blow it once in a while. The trick is to recover as best you can, while maintaining the human connection. Politicians don’t have to be Jesus, but if you can’t occasionally set the prepared speech aside and invite people to share their suffering, then as a candidate you’re not worth a bucket of warm piss, to use John Nance Garner’s colorful expression. In tha…
Read More…model, is severely restrained in its authority over economic activity. The best check on the depravity of individuals who make up the civil government is the decentralization of authority into the distinct spheres; the best check on the depravity of human beings in the economy is the decentralization of the market created by competition. Historian Michael McVicar has this called this “theocratic libertarianism”: it creates an economic zone free of…
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…e of law, and minority rights in their societies. When the U.S. government bestows high-level diplomatic attention instead on select (typically male, adult, and non-democratically appointed) spokespersons, it aids them in consolidating their own power and authority within their communities. The Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group does not ignore this potential for discrimination. It writes of the importance of partnering with “women religiou…
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…e is the GOP now, whose branding with Latino/a voters was next to nil? The best-case scenario is that it can’t get any worse. And where are the religious leaders who’ve dedicated a significant portion of their cache to claims that they can work with the GOP and get them to tone down the invective against their church members? Well, there are always those spurious religious freedom cases to rally around, making sure the local panaderia doesn’t make…
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