Religion Dispatches
…e’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed silent…
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…. In addition, Reality Check takes care to note disparate outcomes among African-American, Latinx, ex-Muslim, and LGBTQ respondents, the intersections of whose racial, ethnic, sexuality, and gender identities can affect their experiences as nonreligious Americans. After reading Reality Check, I recently decided to test the waters on how the politically engaged, broadly progressive public might relate to the representation of nonreligious Americans…
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…. I need to get his input, too. Just this morning I told them, the great African Americans who supported me completely, what an amazing job Fred is doing, being recognized more and more. They loved it. They love me. My speech was a the biggest success in the history of black people. The media lied about it, of course. They said I didn’t know Douglass. They just can’t stop lying. Oh, gotta go, that’s my man Douglass on the phone right now. #amen #m…
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…rom any kind of philosophical enterprise that isn’t rooted in strictly empirical claims? Seidel stuck to his main point. “At its most basic, you’re still stuck with the problem that the government is funding theological inquiry,” he said. “That just can’t happen.” In some ways, the question here boils down to something like: What the heck is theology? Is it a specifically Christian pursuit? Does it only have applications for religious people? In i…
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…e, isolated, backward. I offered this concern to Bell when we spoke on the phone. He responded thoughtfully, but cautiously. “Oh yeah. See the thing is: we actually do have real, life-or-death problems going on. And many of us are totally convinced that this” (he meant the stated reason for the law, the phantom possibility of trans, or fake-trans, people preying on young women in bathrooms) “is not one of them.” True enough, but to say that HB2 is…
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…ollege she joined an urban mission trip where she spent time with fellow African Americans and was “reintroduced to myself as a black person.” She began to see herself through God’s eyes “as someone made in the image of God whom God loves.” Lisa learned to embrace her identity as a black woman, but when she brought her newly empowered self back to her conservative white community, she was rejected. Eventually her vision of evangelicalism took a sh…
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…me, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The Catholic Church is a very African institution in Africa,” says Gina Zurlo, associate director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. “When people are looking at Catholicism, they can say, ‘I can still be African and Catholic at the same time.’ You don’t have to become Western.” … Africa looks set to remain the Catholic Church’s beaco…
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…, Pew has given us a narrow, skewed insight into how a select subset of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and ri…
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…Wuthnow writes, is “the phenomenon of drawing generalizations about the American public, meaning all of the American population, based on evidence that mostly reflects the sampled responses of the white majority.” Christian norming happens, too: a poll that supposedly reflects the nation’s views on God is, often, mostly talking about Christian views. In doing so, it’s essentially conflating “Christian” with “American,” a strategy typically associa…
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…ng is in keeping with a type of spirituality she shares with an increasing number of Americans. She holds what some academics would call a form of metaphysical spirituality. Historian of American religion Catherine Albanese traces metaphysical religion or spirituality through New Age spirituality back through late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Theosophy and back to Spiritualism and Mesmerism. It’s a type of spirituality concerned with int…
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