Religion Dispatches
…ers qualitatively superior to mine in nearly every respect. Since the early 1980s, this man had had season tickets to our favorite team. He’d not just lived through but witnessed firsthand the golden ages of purple reign. He’d sat through the playoffs, too. Magic, Kareem, Worthy, Shaq, Kobe. On their way to ten titles! I was ablaze with jealousy. But later in our conversation, as the topic shifted to our respective travels, he made an offhand rema…
Read More…ocations to come: In Pittsburgh, reports The New York Times, deaths now outnumber births and hospitals are closing obstetrics wards or converting them to acute care for the elderly. In fact, as The New York Times wrote in the same piece, the phenomenon is less Children of Men than Roger & Me, with the closing of rustbelt factories as a prime cause of the flight of young families with children, while at the same time senior citizens started returni…
Read More…ancy Pelosi’s numbers have being going down a chute faster than a Jet Blue flight attendant” and “President Obama’s idea of a rogue state is Arizona.” As for the substance of Romney’s speech, what was most notable was the absence of talk about values, let alone religion. Instead, Romney sounded every bit the corporate buyout and turnaround specialist, criticizing the “anti-growth,” “anti-investment” Obama administration for forgetting the priv…
Read MoreIn a 1972 speech, science fiction author Philip K. Dick expressed his concern over the increasing dehumanization that 20th century culture forced upon its inhabitants. He feared that, just as we were beginning to reach toward the stars, we were becoming emotional androids. “Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings,” Dick wrote. “Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what w…
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…graham—a speaker’s bureau of conservative ideology. When I was there in the 1980s, there is never even any pretense of ideological balance. (Full disclosure: I was chair of the College Republicans. Looking back I’d say that was a pretty effective coping strategy for deeply closeted and conflicted gay man. Full disclosure no. 2: I stopped making contributions to Harding when Bay Buchanan was invited to campus. Alumni loyalty has its limits.) In a 1…
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…m, the question of the day was similar to ones being asked today: Can this flight from the churches be stopped? Chubb feared that these wayfarers on the frontier would “become individualists and isolationists so far as religion is concerned, each ‘going it alone.’” Chubb’s words, so similar to Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone,” resonate clearly today, and they offer a warning to those who bemoan what such high numbers of “nones” means for the future…
Read More…enies that he has either a liberal or a conservative agenda. During his in-flight presser on Tuesday afternoon, he said it was a mistake to interpret him as “left-ish”: It is I who follows the church … my doctrine on all this … on economic imperialism, is that of the social doctrine of the church. While that may be true, the reality is that the social doctrine of the Catholic Church is a left-leaning doctrine that emphasizes communitarianism, disd…
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…ons to the formation of “movement” Christianity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then he dropped out, turned his back on that kind of power and glory. He produced low-budget movies for a time, wrote some decent autobiographical fiction, and finally returned to writing about the thing he knows best: the damage wrought by hard, doctrinal religion. One senses from this book that Schaeffer is at last free of the need to strap on his sword and buckle…
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…shootings in 2009: that of Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 servicemen and women and wounded 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, and George Sodini, who killed 3 women and wounded 12 at a Pennsylvania fitness club. Both men had no friends, work issues, difficulties meeting women, and felt victimized—Sodini by women and Hasan by his fellow soldiers for being a Muslim. And both men intended to die. Sodini shot himself before he could be stoppe…
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…l formation along the way of describing his repeated trips to Brazil in the 1930s, his flight from France after the Nazis overran the country in 1940 (he fought in that failed French attempt to hold the Maginot Line against the German Blitz), and his happenstance return to Brazil (he was granted a visa to come to the New School of Social Research in New York, but got held up in French Martinique, and eventually made his way back to Brazil where he…
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