Religion Dispatches
…erature by women matters—even and maybe especially wildly popular novels peddling maddening characters to mass female audiences. Because Stowe and the feminist critics who championed her (and I think Meyer too) knew that tremendous power happens when women connect with women on a mass scale. And this goes to one of the basic foundations of feminism: solidarity. Solidarity in its fullest sense means a willingness to stand by, respect, and promote t…
Read More
…etting into their personal business via legislation or government policy. Add to these “nones” the increasing number of Americans who do self-identify as religious but who decline to vote the way certain popinjay enforcers would have them vote—who vote instead on bread-and-butter issues—and you have a pretty significant sea-change from the last few election cycles. One can imagine the used-car business is looking better and better to the likes of…
Read More
…ts in human history, including those in which Jews suffered terribly, are adduced as well: “the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition… genocides and ethnic cleansing.” In these events, the statement notes, people used Scripture to “elevate one people or one race over another,” and “to support conquest and oppression.” It then compares these horrors with Israeli policies, often in identical language. The choice of these pedigrees for the modern conflic…
Read More
…s were entirely different. My desire to control the arthritic pain of my middle-aged body had nothing to do with my adolescent yearning to be skinny. Yet the feeling of wanting to conquer, escape, or transcend my body was very familiar. This familiarity made me wonder whether diverse body issues like weight, chronic pain and illness, disability, and aging are somehow connected. How do we think and feel about somatic experiences that elude our abso…
Read More
…e was not totally impressed. The show, he wrote, was “stuffed with facts and dates and figures” and sometimes strained “to find a way to tie them together.” He also called it “an unusually serious and, to use a word the producers would probably rather not see, intellectual endeavor for television, one that doesn’t make many compromises for short attention spans.” Some professional historians and scholars of American religion, in contrast, criticiz…
Read More
…ports that ISIS supporters “often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam,” and that they, “spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar.” These people speak with authority, so they must be authoritative. So the logic goes. In the article, Wood relies on the familiar Protestant notion that literalist reading of original…
Read More
…ld and must be. However, with the loss of Cone a certain way of thinking and doing black theology—a certain posture toward the work—might have come to an end. This statement has several meanings. First, theology reflecting a mode of (de)construction—first and foremost in conversation with a so-called “dominant” tradition marked out intellectually by figures such as Karl Barth—is no longer the bedrock of black theology’s explicit critique. Perhaps…
Read More
…you have the use of something without owning it. So obviously enjoyment and desire are not incompatible with possessiveness. From what I understand, queer theorists try to point towards an enjoyability, cut loose from the jealousy and possessiveness that structure a traditional heterosexual relationship. It’s interesting to me that so many post-structuralist thinkers are a bit suspicious of pleasure, which is banal, next to the shattering experie…
Read More
…ly limited. And in their efforts to win battles against conservative narratives, Francis’s liberal defenders are failing to address that limitation….
Read More
…ow both Jewish academic and religious communities should best respond. In addition, Cohen’s own intellectual project is perhaps the most prominent example of an approach to Jewish Studies that lauds “Jewish continuity” as central to the connections between Jewish Studies and American Jewish communal life, and this approach has been critiqued by Lila Corwin Berman, Kate Rosenblatt, Ronit Stahl, and others, precisely on the grounds of its instrument…
Read More