Religion Dispatches
…Western Muslim Brotherhood, seem poised to take power throughout the Middle East as a result of riots that have already toppled one Arab regime and are threatening others, in what some are calling only the latest wave of an Islamic ‘tsunami’ sweeping the globe.” Oh, and look! The Brotherhood has learned its tactics from Bill Ayers and Code Pink. Don’t you love living in a fact-free world?…
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…ure poses, and, in some extreme cases, distinguishing features is only the latest stop on the elevator ride up from the basement of the religious unconscious—the postmodern return of one of the most primitive manifestations of the fan mind, namely, ritual cannibalism, in which participants absorb an enemy’s magical powers by eating his flesh. Following Freud’s analysis, in Totem and Taboo, of the Christian Eucharist as a revival of that ancient to…
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…ce) requiring synagogues to pay their employees living wages. Finally, the latest rabbinical seminary on the block, the Modern Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCC) has a social justice track which culminates in doing a social project. (Canfei Nesharim was started by students at YCC.) This is truly a revolutionary change. What does it look like? What does it mean? Social Activist Jews Studying Talmud? On a Sunday morning in the Los Angeles Jewish…
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…d not permit boys and girls to talk to each other, demanded a strict dress code, taught that girls should never run, and demanded that girls style their hair wavy—not straight or curly—because “wavy hair is attractive and becoming—it causes you to focus on the woman’s face instead of her body.” Gothard’s approved wavy hairstyle is meant, she said, “to attract men to your bright eyes, which will attract them to God, instead of your body.” Eliza ela…
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As the Holy See continues to respond to the latest uproar over pedophilic priests (specifically the accusation that the Pope himself, when still Cardinal Ratzinger, was intimately involved in covering up the actions of serial molesters) the matter has become strangely entwined with another of the Church’s persistent headaches: the Jewish question. First, on Good Friday, the Pope’s personal preacher offered a homily in which sustained criticism o…
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…who has written about the civic engagement of African-American women in my latest book, Rev. Cook’s scattered resumé lacks the distinction of other notable black women historically involved in both religious affairs and international engagement, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, educator, civil rights leader, and founder of the National Council of Negro Women, or Sue Bailey Thurman, who was committed to inter-religious and interracial understanding (sh…
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…oid and exerting its will on Christianity. Support for Trump is merely the latest in a long pattern of mainstream Christian denominations siding with authoritarian power and finding themselves on the wrong side of history. It isn’t an accident. It was entirely predictable. In fact, it’s such an old story that anyone who is surprised by this latest iteration should probably be disqualified from sharing an opinion on the matter. But demon belief—and…
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…s rise and controversial final months. I had first met Neiwert when he was promoting his 2017 book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump,3 a definitive chronicle of the rise of the Patriot, Alt Right, and MAGA movements that led to Trump’s election. Neiwert’s reporting had a unique quality: no matter how established he was in covering this world, he always found something new, injected a fresh perspective into the coverag…
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…se with Zizek’s restatement of his critique of “anti-anti-Semitism” in his latest book, Violence (Picador, 2008). In it, he takes up the case of historian David Irving, who was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for a 1989 interview doubting the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Zizek attacks Irving’s imprisonment on the grounds that criminalizing his doubt of the Shoah is “the most refined and perverted version of Holocaust deni…
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…f they’re not essential to the faith itself?” I might recommend Robinson’s latest novel Home. “Read this,” I’d say, “and it might give you a clue.” But if my inquisitive friend were not so much interested in religious matters as in the possibilities of fiction or in my own opinion as to what describes a great writer of fiction, I would hand him or her the two novels at once. “Read these,” I’d say, “and then consider that the same person was capabl…
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