Religion Dispatches
…e springing from the grass roots upward. No one breaks down barricades for tickets, abandons cars by the side of the highway, or creates spontaneous parades. Like the other events of the festival circuit (Lollapalooza, Coachella, Austin City Limits), Bonnaroo is a top-down affair staged by skilled, professional producers. In 2007, the festival revenues reportedly topped $17 million, making it the highest-grossing event of its kind in the world. Ye…
Read More
…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
Read More
…. And so, purity and prosperity are conjoined to produce a special kind of American exceptionalism—one that’s maintained in the sphere of the American evangelical family, and which, unavoidably, intersects with the political. This is where we see and hear the Christian Right. This American exceptionalism is then inseparable from national identity. The language of American evangelical exceptionalism demonstrates how evangelicals have “successfully…
Read More
…porters. Rock for Life’s willingness to operate within the institutions of American culture is in line with American Catholic attempts to create space for their voice within the liberal democratic system. In 1999, Kemper initiated a bold plan to counter a pro-choice petition drive sponsored by Rock for Choice. Rock for Choice gathered some 50,000 signatures in support of abortion rights on petitions which were then delivered to Congress and the Wh…
Read More
…e “big three” advocacy organizations—the Freedom from Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State—and commented on the increasing diversification of the secular movement, as a result of which “the movement has seen a more intersectional approach.” To be sure, movement atheism has long been dominated by cisgender white men, and much work remains to be done both in terms of diversifying leaders…
Read More…ly between religion and neuroscience, but also, more specifically, between American religious history and American neuroscience. By way of proposition and broad outline, I want to suggest three conversational pivots for that kind of discussion: 1) The first is the historical interchange between religion and technology. It is useful, I think, to step aside for a moment from the religion-science nexus and to foreground the religion-technology relati…
Read More
…ing you had to leave out? Of course! As it is, the book has chapters about American Jewish philosophy, religious conversion, the American west, Jewish identification with “Indians,” agricultural schools, Zionism, crime in New York, the Leo Frank case, and the Leopold and Loeb hearing. It would have been great to write chapters about sports, or about World War I, or about philanthropy, or about film. Or about ten or twelve more things I can think o…
Read More…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…
Read More
…Go to any university in America and you’ll come across a disproportionate number of Muslims. Before Dawkins can cry, ‘You succeed in the West but not the non-West!’—and thereby claim the superiority of the West he and I are both happily a part of—note that American Muslims have, on the whole, done much better than Western European Muslims. Whose fault is that? Why are Muslims succeeding culturally, creatively, and scientifically, in America, but…
Read More
…collected in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History. In Embattled Ecumenism, American historian Jill K. Gill has recounted in rich detail the involvement of the National Council of Churches in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Sociologists Christian Smith and Patricia Snell, building on an argument by sociologist Jay Demerath, contend in Souls in Transition that liberal Protestantism contributed to its own decl…
Read More