Religion Dispatches
…Catholics the “most degraded and brutal white population in the world.” He complained of “commercial treaties” that “open a direct trade in German and Irish Catholics” and of “public improvements that give them immediate and constant employment, at very high wages.” He also decried naturalization laws that “allow all these people to become American citizens in five years” and have full voting rights. Breckinridge didn’t call directly for a ban on…
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…n professor—as anyone but a transgressor of the American evangelical church-state complex. Sadly, one can only conclude that the sanctions against Hawkins have little to do with any serious concerns for Christian orthodoxy but rather show a deep fear among evangelicals that faith in Christ might lead the believer to encounter the radical humanity of others outside the fold, Islamic or not. How could it have been any other way? I would argue that e…
Read More…cal capitalism, which has long promoted the notion that the Bible endorses free enterprise and abhors socialism. The first executives in the National Association of Manufacturers argued unions were in open warfare against Christianity.” By gutting the right of unions to be compensated for collective bargaining and organizing, the Janus decision could reverse decades of gains for American workers. As the wages of corporate CEOs continue to skyrocke…
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…recede to minority status within the population at large. In an invaluable new book titled After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Yale theologian Willie James Jennings brings needed attention to the ways in which the White Way of Thinking perpetuates itself in academic settings where what’s called “rigor” is really an unexamined allegiance to a certain ideal of white masculinist self-sufficiency. Jennings gives eloquent voice to his own anger…
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…ation and self-reliance and communal progress.” When I brought up this hope-and-progress energy with Vanderbilt historian Paul Stob, a scholar of intellectual culture, he described it as “a great similarity between TED talks today and lectures back then.” In the lyceum era, you weren’t just selling ideas; as Stob puts it, “you were peddling hope and sensibility and a sense of progress.” Wright calls the lyceum lecture “a displaced secular sermon.”…
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…d Rock ’n’ Roll Randall J. Stephens Harvard U. Press March 19, 2018 In his new book, The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘n’ Roll, historian Randall J. Stephens documents the turbulent relationship between Christian faith and popular music in the twentieth century United States. How did Christians inspire rock ‘n’ roll? I focus quite a bit on Pentecostalism; especially in chapter one, which focuses on the origi…
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…reasoning, overcoming its impatience with deep and patient thinking, close-reading, and complex theorizing. Such an approach emerges from and reaffirms thinking that transgresses disciplinary and temporal boundaries. Perhaps the constraints of academia have become such that it’s unconducive to radically experimental work. Embracing collaborative and comparative research without heed to disciplinary and hierarchical borders licenses us to pursue w…
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…n in a presidential race that our problems can only be solved by a narrowly-conceived conservative protestant Jesus will, I suspect, court the suspicion and resistance experienced by John Adams. For his own good as well as the good of his constituents, Perry should take some wisdom from a Founding Father and call the whole thing off. God’s Law is the Only Law: The Genesis of Michele Bachmann SARAH POSNER • Jul 11, 2011 In Titus’ view, the First Am…
Read More…better served if we understand these utterances for what they are: political slogans that speak not to the origins of our nation but to a specific point in its not-so-distant past. If they are to mean anything to us now, we should understand what they meant then.”…
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…kings? Finally, I brought a jar with me to the meeting. It was to be my coffee mug, water pitcher, and companion for the five days I was there. It became my friend. The jar is a mason jar with a top on it from a worker’s cooperative. I remember thinking that it was a small, nearly meaningless action compared to 250 million climate refugees. And then I came home to something like my humanity, how partial it is, how particular it is, how most of wha…
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