Religion Dispatches
…e intolerance. The New Atheism’s Positive Contributions At their best, the New Atheists foster a renewed sense of respect for science, spur on social progress, and empower the growing but reviled nontheistic minority to find its voice in America’s public square. Public support for science is notoriously low in the United States, especially when it comes to culturally controversial topics such as the origin of life and humanity, embryonic stem-cell…
Read More
…council meetings. Criminalizing libraries and librarians While most of the new playbook isn’t really new, and simply builds on its original themes, there is one new model bill that bears special attention because it builds out a new dimension of Project Blitz’s religious and political vision, and exposes their view of democratic institutions. Indeed, the bill became infamous months before it morphed into a secret model in the Project Blitz playboo…
Read More…This is because society recognises the importance of the setting in which new human life, new members of society come into existence. “It is of vital importance to society that the definition of marriage is protected, sustained and supported.” India: Couple’s high-profile marriage in defiance of anti-gay law BuzzFeed reported last week on a gay couple that was married in a religious ceremony at the end of January. “A Sanskrit teacher conducted th…
Read More
…the situation clear. Past is prologue Correction to prophetic abuse isn’t new. Corrections that didn’t work are also not new. A scandal in 1990 featuring the so-called Kansas City Prophets (KCP) set the stage for the current standoff. Ernie Gruen, a Charismatic pastor in Kansas City, accused Mike Bickle and the KCP of prophetic abuses in a 233-page document, targeting mainly prophets Bob Jones, Paul Cain, and John Paul Jackson. (Bickle is familia…
Read More
…hemes of his presidency: to call the UCC to rethink itself and to consider new ways of “being church.” Postmoderns, he says, are less interested in institutional religion than their predecessors and tend not to be joiners but “samplers.” “A whole new way of discovering the life of faith is emerging without the permission of or training required by the established church,” he writes in Beyond Resistance. “Those engaged in this faith exploration are…
Read More…the death of the oh-so-very-tired. Visceral, extremely bloody and painful, new life is new life, to be celebrated in all its mewling imperfection. It signals new beginnings, new possibilities and new terrains. What form will new life take? What is the nature of a new Egypt? Is it tall and strong? Does it have a mind of its own? What color will it be? Red, blue or green? Will it look different from what we expected? What developmental trajectory wi…
Read More
…ists find them abrasive. These critics of the New Atheists might be called New New Atheists. They too have come forward to proclaim atheism, yet to denounce the New Atheists in a way that to me is reminiscent of the church splits that my evangelical/Calvinist missionary parents (Francis and Edith Schaeffer who founded the ministry of L’Abri in Switzerland) went through. We became members of ever “purer” churches through one “separation” after anot…
Read More
…concurrent development of a radical, diverse, and frequently experimental new genre that, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), I termed the “New Religion Journalism.” Associating the genre with the founding of Killing the Buddha by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau in 2000, I claim that the New Religion Journalism became a necessary way of investigating faith, especially following 9/11. Over the past two decades, there has been the eme…
Read More
…is as global as it is local. The NAR also reaches into the US from other countries in the same way that NAR reaches other countries from the US. While this sense of global vision and mission isn’t new in Christianity, there’s much that is new in this important contemporary movement that demands attention and better reporting for the first, rough draft of history….
Read More
…at that time were supportive in reviews and comments (Ellen Lewin, Esther Newton and others). Other colleagues seemed surprised at my new choice of fieldwork site, but appreciative of my employment of the “old” method of participant observation. I had no direct connection with LGBT communities, but gay friends seemed very pleased with my choice and complimented me for the supportive presentation and the engaging literary style. The editor of Ling…
Read More