Religion Dispatches
…church teaching and church practice.” For example, they think it matters a great deal to be able to bracket the weirdly anachronistic and formulaic statements attributed to Jesus of Nazareth that were never spoken by the Galilean upstart but that were put into his mouth by early church types. They think it matters hugely to look at archeological evidence for what the early Jesus movement believed and how it functioned. They also think it matters h…
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…o the BBC or clogged up my Twitter feed. (Which is a kind of echo chamber, great for sharing information and great for getting stuck in it—many Turks, after all, are not Tweeters.) So I went ahead and out of my way and talked to as many folks as I could, especially the religious Turks, those for whom Islam mattered and Ataturk’s legacy (had) meant trouble. There’s a bias at work, of course, but I’m admitting to it—and redressing an imbalance in We…
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…tes. Because ultimately this is a question not only of race but ortho-ethnicity (right people). Once again, Black people are not seen as the right type of Jews regardless of their level of observance unless they’ve been authenticated by White Jewish authorities. Jews of color hostile to Hebrew Israelites argue that they’re already facing racial discrimination which is only exacerbated by the existence of Hebrew Israelites. For those harboring raci…
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…ven to ourselves. To be part of an empire and to admit as much invites any number of discomfiting questions. If it is dishonest to deny the fact, is it naive not to accept the reality and make the best of it? Might an empire be a force for good? Or is “force for good” an oxymoron? If so, why? And even so, how does a Roman manage, in practical terms, to say no to Rome? My distant neighbor Thomas Naylor, a former Duke economics professor and more re…
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…held in January 2005, George W. Bush addressed pro-life supporters via telephone, saying: “we are working to promote a culture of life.” The president’s language is certainly in line with Rock for Life’s rhetoric, and the group’s willingness to work within the system runs counter to the militant overtones of the Pledge. Interestingly, the Pledge makes no mention of the legal process, despite the reference to abortion as a protected right in “The D…
Read More…t be able to exercise more influence over their members’ behavior, but the numbers favor the bigger outfits. It’s important to notice as well how American social self-sorting affects the political situation. Congregations of any size tend to be more or less politically homogeneous, whether liberal or conservative. Meanwhile, megachurches also tend to be located in suburban neighborhoods, often the most competitive electoral districts these days. S…
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…a. There, He reveals Himself somewhat randomly to Moses, a displaced great-great-grandson of Jacob. Citing telltale evidence, Coogan posits that the people who eventually identified as Israelites were far from monotheistic at the beginning; they chose to follow their possessive parochial deity out of a position of relative weakness. And really, who would not love a god who loves you so much that He invites you to destroy your enemies—including all…
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…belief, as expressed in Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for the new country’s Great Seal, that “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” To whom did the Founders appeal? As Walter McDougall writes in his excellent history of American civil religion, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: “The American God had no name and a hundred names.” McDougall argues that the generic quality of the deity—and the wide definition of that concept—proved essential fo…
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…Jews are crucial to commerce, “like the pegs and nails that one uses in a great building, and which are necessary to join all the parts.” But Voltaire’s Candide was swindled by Jews, and Montesquieu asserted that “wherever there is money, there are Jews.” The philosophes, however, were certainly less preoccupied with the “Jewishness” of a concept than were the great German philosophers. Nirenberg reminds us that for Kant, Judaism represented “a…
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…usand-Year Reich.” “Apocalyptic” refers to “a sense of imminence about the great upheaval and the scenario whereby we now go from this evil and corrupt world to the redeemed one.” Every millennial group, whether religious or secular, is marked by the transformation of “normal time” to “apocalyptic time”—when its followers eagerly anticipate the millennium, seeing signs and symbols everywhere in a state of “semiotic arousal” (similar to the way int…
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