Religion Dispatches
…holarship done this summer. Meanwhile, I try to hold it together to write a 800-word piece without crying and wanting to tear my hair out about the pain of my people. I’m not writing prophetic words to you anymore. You fix this shit. I’m done carrying the cross of America, its false promises of democracy and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black peo…
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…she mobilized anthropology to survive prison. This past week, and in some ways since 2001, I find myself staring at a blank screen, trying to write a response to the representation, specifically the misrepresentation of Muslims, in American news media. Hoodfar’s statement that it wasn’t the fieldwork she chose, and yet she had to write about it, really resonates with me. How do I as an anthropologist who works with Muslim youth in Pakistan and th…
Read MoreLate last month, Pope Francis met with charismatic Christian and Pentecostal leaders at the Vatican, including prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a popular American religious figure whose theology and lifestyle is directly at odds with the Pope’s. The meeting was not the humble Pope’s first encounter with the self-anointed bishops of bling. In February, he recorded a video message for a Copeland conference, in which he called for u…
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…of one generation being visited down three or four generations (Exodus 20; Numbers 14; Deuteronomy 5; Jeremiah 32). This transmission isn’t mystical but is both genetic and cultural. Just as abuse begets abuse and addiction begets addiction, prejudice begets prejudice. In the Christian Scripture, Paul talks about the need to reckon not just with sinful individual nature but with “principalities and powers,” a theological way of describing the impe…
Read More…o? Oh, so it might just completely wreck her life and re-traumatize her in ways I can never really understand since I’m not her? Yeah, that’s fine. I’m okay with that possibility. Make sure she does what I think she should do. Make sure it’s not her decision.” I doubt most supporters of personhood measures would actually say that. I’d like to think most of them don’t think that. But that just shows how important it is to remember, when the subject…
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…ics-as-entertainment culture, and the extraordinary fulfillment of all the ways that faith, apocalypticism, and the politics of fear can combine to help someone raise cash. Bakker has always had a nose for spectacle. In 1977, he started the PTL Satellite Network, making him one of the first religious leaders to recognize the potential of satellite TV. Then, using his fame and profits from the network, he started Heritage USA. Built on more than 2,…
Read More…ims and accusers. In 1995, the Church established stronger guidelines and new protocols for reporting abuse, including a 1-800 number for local clergy. …
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…seven million people. (According to the World Health Organization more than 800 people around the world have died from this flu.) Flying over Israel and taking one’s prayers a little closer to the heavens might seem like a recent rabbinic innovation, but it is not. Actually, there were a number of precedents for such prayer flights; one as early as 1942, when the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine feared that the Nazis would break through the Bri…
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…at uncommon.” And that’s true. Millions of infants have been baptised this way over centuries (including me, by the way). What’s uncommon is for an infant to die, as was the case last week. So what happened? Well, the Romanian, Greek, and Russian press all make note of the fact that the priest baptized the infant face up while holding his hand over the infant’s face and mouth (something observable in the video of the baptism). This is not the posi…
Read More…portunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere. While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway, discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimatized or mistakenly portrayed as an opinion held by only the most extremist elements of the Right. *Large chunks of the manifesto are wholesale copied from the books, articles, or websi…
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