Religion Dispatches
…g like the kind of hard-edged Christian faith that demands such harshness and cruelty, but their film makes it clear that they understand both that and how the struggle of someone like Carlton Pearson is really the struggle for the soul of Christianity itself….
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…rian Christians over the last few election cycles aren’t enough to get The New York Times or The Atlantic to question the conflation of “Christian” with “good,” or to grasp that authoritarian Christians cannot be reached at scale by selectively quoting the Bible at them, I don’t know what will. I do, however, have a modest proposal that might help push our discourse about Christianity and power in a more honest direction were enough of us to get o…
Read More…the entire wall-building, immigrant-rejecting, benefit-cutting Republican worldview. #2 “Some think, excuse me if I use the word, that in order to be good Catholics, we have to be like rabbits—but no.” Pope Francis’ off-the-cuff remark that good Catholics don’t have to breed like bunnies on his way home from the Philippines was widely hailed as another “stunner” from the pontiff. But the Catholic Church as taught since the 1950s that it’s accepta…
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…ook About It.” (Those are his actual words). To put it in perspective, the word “dick” appears 23 times in the slightly more than 200 pages that makes up the meat of Fighting God. The word “brainwash” and its variants appear 36 times, while the “American Way” appears 13. This is not a sophisticated book. Which was why I was so surprised to see Fighting God receive substantial endorsements from the New Atheist establishment. “How refreshing it is t…
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…directly into the nationalist Christian supremacism that’s fueling the destruction of American democracy, such as it was? Or that words like “regular,” “real,” and “normal,” in this context are often code for “conservative white Christians”? Might Merritt have devoted a thought or two to the possibility that American criticism of “thoughts and prayers” responses to real-world problems have everything to do with the fact that right-wing Christians—…
Read More…more?” Mitt is so Mormon he’ll reroute the Freedom Trail through Palmyra, New York, Nauvoo, Illinois, and Winter Quarters, Iowa. Mitt is so Mormon he’ll rename the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms the Word of Wisdom squad. Mitt is so Mormon he’d do an ad for the LDS Church: “I’m a husband, father, and leader of the free world. And I’m a Mormon.” Mitt is so Mormon he isn’t as concerned about getting American youth jobs as he is about getti…
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…ack Gotham, Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, and Christopher Hager’s Word by Word. And I really love Fred Moten’s In the Break, which is written in a different style from those I’ve just listed but brilliant and a blast to read. What’s your next book? I have a few projects in the works, including a couple of edited collections of scholarly essays and a big, long-term project on histories of black revolution. But first I’m going to write a bo…
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…ong as possible, seemingly even at the expense of blocking any possible peace. A more cynical view of Palin’s words may infer that her statement was nothing more than a play on a famous phrase (originating from Crusader Arnaud Amalric’s sacking of Beziers), which received an update by troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan (two wars Palin supported as “God’s will”): “Kill ‘em all. Let Allah Sort ‘em Out.”…
Read More…ound and take it away. “What that means is that if the Christian people in New York state or in one of the other states that recognize same-sex marriage realize they don’t want it anymore, they can change their law,” La Rue said. That’s a very good point. As we celebrate the victories from the Supreme Court this past week, we also must remember that all progress is subject to regress. We can never rest on our laurels and must be vigilant to defend…
Read More…ervices over the next days and weeks. Of course as a pastor I’m aware that words of consolation are appropriate and necessary at a time like this. But if actual truth-telling isn’t also appropriate now, I don’t know when it will be. American violence doesn’t emerge from thin air. It has a very specific pedigree in the failed project known as whiteness, with a strong assist from toxic masculinity. We won’t heal unless we can name what’s ailing us….
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