Religion Dispatches
…feat at the polls. Unless, of course, that candidate’s real goal was to not-so-subtly blame his party’s electoral loss on the fact that they had failed to nominate him, and to set himself up for a future presidential run. And that appears to be exactly what Huckabee has in mind because, as the book closes, he relates an anecdote about his daughter Sarah getting a plastic ring out of a vending machine before the campaign finished second in the Iowa…
Read More…ization with around 8,000 members, is dismayed by Penguin Books India’s out-of-court settlement in which it has agreed to withdraw and destroy all copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History. This decision undermines freedom of expression and academic freedom, both of which are the foundations of serious scholarship. That Penguin India has made this decision absent a court decision and under pressure from an advocacy group is…
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…extraordinary season of critical adulation. What’s going on? Why has a good-not-great religious satire from the creators of South Park received rapturous praise from the whole canon of media tastemakers? It may be true that The Book of Mormon is the second-best musical début (behind American Idiot) on the Great White Way in recent memory, but that’s really not saying much. In a season devoted mainly to re-runs, revivals, and adaptations, The Book…
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…Zoebot, we are witnessing the tension between her free mind and her not-so-free robotic exterior. It was moving to see her facial expressions when Daniel commanded Zoebot to ripoff its own arm. But how far will this obedience go? Is this setting up the stage for the grand old story of Abraham’s sacrifice—except, perhaps, the decision will now be in the hands of the offspring? One more note on Tamara’s virtual-only existence. Of course, many of us…
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…l prejudices make the general public less likely to sympathize with the low-income African Americans most affected by these policies. But it’s more complicated than just racial prejudice. It’s difficult to pin down exactly how people come to their views. I think the best we can do is present people’s views in all their complexity. Otherwise people arguing for one position or another may miss the mark because they misunderstand what their audiences…
Read More…question about his advocacy of child labor, he told a story about a 16 year-old he met in New Hampshire who had started a donut business at age 11. He offered wonkolicious “solutions,” completely divorced from the situations and questions being presented to him. The headline for the Politico story on the campaign stop was “Newt Gingrich battles with crowd at black church.” That, of course, misses the point. Here was Gingrich, who in any other chur…
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…th the NCPL position might be that they are challenging a practice (a hands-over-head stretch) that isn’t religious in and of itself. The hands-over-head stretch only becomes religious in the context of a larger tradition. In this sense, stopping kids from yoga stretching because it is religious in some contexts makes about as much sense as banning kids from shaving their heads simply because it reminds you of Buddhism. However, the organizational…
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…r taken by Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge was famous for his innovations in high-speed photography, and is often credited as the inventor of the moving image. Athletic motion (that of horses, acrobats, runners) was a common subject of his experiments and public lectures. I focus quite a bit in my book on the relationship between athletic movement and audiovisual capture, and argue that this relationship lies at the heart of sport’s “religious” qual…
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…ents of 19th-century white supremacy, the 20th century witnessed the coming-of-age of an assortment of rank-and-file white supremacists. The emergence of many of these groups paralleled the galvanization of desegregationist and anti-racist forces from the mid-century forward. A group regarded by advocates and critics alike as the ideological backbone of the contemporary white supremacist movement is “Christian Identity,” which asserts “White, Angl…
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…omophobia. I was thinking about the folks teaching Sunday school, or the 20-year-old who knows there is something off about the story their church has been telling. When I listen to my children’s questions, or talk with my undergrad students, and even my seminary students, I realize that they are all trying to get out from under a story about our beginnings and our ends that has been hyper-spiritualized. Somehow the story of Christianity they lear…
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