Religion Dispatches
…fer’s critique: A nation became Christian and Lutheran but at the cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme tha…
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…inter-religious dialogue and cooperative action. I am a sucker for clever worldplay and, for reasons I explain in the book, I liked the idea of “reclaiming” that word. At one point we toyed with calling it (F)a(i)theist but eventually decided that was kind of overkill. Also, can you imagine the complications that would cause for library shelving systems?! How do you feel about the cover? My publisher, Beacon Press, is so wonderful. As far as I’m…
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…-secret-Muslim theme have suggested various sources for it: ignorance, Fox News, racism, too much World Net Daily in your diet. Theodoridis’ post was inspired by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s remarks that he didn’t know whether Obama is a Christian. But do other elected Republicans suggest that Obama is not only not a Christian, but a Muslim? I ran a search in the Congressional Record for recent floor speeches in which the word Islam or Islami…
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…ternet access for the duration of the study because the whole town was overrun by zombies, and they couldn’t get word out because there was a quarantine, OK, fine. But this is a statistically significant pattern. This is something we mainliners tend, as a group, to do. “This” being “act in a white supremacist way.” Yes, white supremacist. That phrase accurately describes the actions of a group that treats emails from white-sounding names as worthi…
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…but rather in his Hell. It was a theme fervently embraced in the medieval world. Christ’s “harrowing” (a word that comes to us from Middle English) seems to have been prefigured in classical sources: Ulysses visits Hades; Orpheus, the father of poetry, barely made his escape from the underworld. Perhaps it’s these pagan associations that make the idea so unpopular today. In the Inferno Virgil tells Dante of the “mighty one” who spirits the Hebrew…
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…in the latter part of the previous century and the hyper-racialized power dynamics therein. There is a story to be told about Pearson who once typified racial-reconciliation on the airwaves, even as he was referred to as “Oral’s little N-word” by Charismatic leaders in private. Pearson’s rise to power and subsequent branding as a heretic in a world that covets theological creativity offers a compelling subtext marked by racial hierarchy, financial…
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…cy in some detail for Religion Dispatches. To add a few more examples, the New York Times has established a permanent home for columnists like Ross Douthat, who warns of the “grim data” on declining religiosity. Rather than establish clearly what’s so grim about it, the article makes two seemingly contradictory accusations against people who’ve left the faith. First, Douthat warns of encroaching “scientism” which, in this context, is code for fail…
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…ackground. It was right after I met you that I was reading Kalefa Sanneh’s New Yorker article in which you talked about how church choirs have always been the province of LGBT parishioners. They always have been. In our indigenous expression that wasn’t a problem. It was Christianity that demonized gay people. When I think about my Pentecostal experience, I think about prayer. And meditation. And inner life. And seeking to know God deeply internal…
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…historical success proves theological truth. It was a zero-sum view of the world: “Truth is with us. All else is falsehood.” That conclusion would haunt Christian believers some generations later with the extraordinary success of Islam. Within twenty years of the death of the prophet Muhammad, Muslim armies controlled the Middle East and much of North Africa. After only two more generations the Muslim empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to In…
Read More…more. I guess he abandoned the idea after a week. It is not that easy. Sometimes you have too much to say, sometimes you really have nothing worth sharing and some times what you say seems awfully stupid even to you. So why, Oh why would you share it— let alone expect people to read it? But people are reading, at least some people at some time. When I was at an iftar this weekend some one made reference to my analogy between Ramadan and the Queen….
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