Religion Dispatches
…ortant new book, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, one of the most striking features of a contemporary Religious Studies department is its easy acceptance of permanent pluralism as the necessary starting point for religious reflection. It’s easy to miss how new, how important, and how startling that starting point really is. Gone are the days when even conservative Christians dream of the eventual “conversion of the Jews” (I leave Bened…
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…history of Jewish anti-Zionism, flattening all differences, accepting Zionist historiography as a given, and refusing to acknowledge any other motivations. Hamas threatens Jews, therefore it is antisemitism. SJP challenges Israel, so it too is antisemitic. It’s important to note that all of this is happening just as the ADL is bowing to pressure from a demonstratively antisemitic far-right. Recently, after tepidly pushing for Twitter to address ri…
Read More…ir of books about leaving homosexuality, whose new article over at the Christian Post rehashes all the lies the right-wing loves to spout about lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. Lest you think he was never gay in the first place, his first paragraph is used to prove his queer cred: “To those who suggest that I never was homosexual, my response is, ‘Does sleeping with over 1,000 men count?’” Actually, no, it doesn’t. Neither the num…
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…sed. Although the Church can claim only 14 million members (an exaggerated statistic that counts all baptisms and births, but not the actual number of churchgoers), representatives of the religion—and representations of it—have managed to become fixtures in popular culture. I don’t have a complete explanation for this, but I would point first to the post-9/11 zeitgeist. In the last decade, there was a national and global debate about the place of…
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…ter? (To justify the alienation, oppression, or killing of a person, you must first dehumanize him.) And you can do all kinds of things to folks who don’t matter. But Dawkins was not quite as clever as he supposed. Writing for The Guardian, Nesrine Malik proposed that if we: insert pretty much any other group of people instead of “Muslims” and the statement would be true. Malik addressed Dawkins directly: You are comparing a specialised academic i…
Read More…U.N. General Assembly, unsettled many in the audience by declaring: “We must stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians everywhere.” Power, who was present for those remarks, said that she was near enough to Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, to hear him mutter: “My God.” There have also been enormous victories for L.G.B.T. people in nations as different as Nepal andMalta over the last few years. This year alone, a popular referendum leg…
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…de anti-Christian. “Bottoms up,” she says, mimicking the motion. Weick’s most striking piece of evidence is the large, stylized letter M, which she claims is not one letter but the Hebrew letter Vav repeated three times. In Hebrew, letters have numerical values. The first letter, Alef, is also the number one; the second letter, Bet, is also the number two; etc. Vav, the sixth letter in the Hebrew alphabet and has the numerical value of six. Theref…
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…he respectability blacks who wish we’d all just get out of the streets and stop protesting. I won’t miss the well-meaning white people who try to commiserate, but won’t have a substantive conversation, or commit to fighting for justice and equality for brown and black people. I won’t miss the large majority of the Asian American community that remains silent. And I sure as hell won’t miss the fake Christianity of conservative white evangelicals. Y…
Read More…is a foe of communism and anti-Semitism). He’s wealthy; he’s a philanthropist for justice causes; he’s a Jew; he’s therefore the scapegoat, whether conservatives invoke tropes about wealthy Jews or their secret control of money or an imaginary one-world order; or as Beck put it, a “shadow government.” Beck — unoriginal, as usual, but also as usual taking his derivative conspiracy theories over the top — further peddled the utterly false claim that…
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…missionaries, to as many as 3,000 students a year. This semester, more than 800 students are registered in Professor Bott’s classes. (Eleven are registered for BYU’s African-American history course this semester.) Professors at BYU routinely find themselves having to address racist and sexist content taught in Bott’s classes, and many are outraged and embarrassed by his rogue remarks to the Washington Post, say sources at the university. “Dr. Bott…
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