Religion Dispatches
…lashes out at expiration as a “job killer.” Already the handicappers are giving odds on how much the White House will end up conceding to the braying anti-tax forces. This looming fight offers a tremendous teachable moment for public ethics if President Obama would only seize it and lead us into a national conversation on the subject of wealth and taxes. Such a conversation could be filled with implicit theological content, inasmuch as what I l…
Read More…f calling Fluke, and her friends, sluts who can’t control themselves. (Patricia Heaton, the star from Everybody Loves Raymond who once won an award from Feminists [!!] for Life, tweeted a whole series of insulting tips for “G-Town Gal,” which were SO FUNNY!) Ha ha! Oh, stop, my sides hurt! Obviously I’m being sarcastic. Name-calling, slut-shaming, and bullying a woman is a nasty (not to mention obvious and overdone) thing to do. On the other hand,…
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…triggered some deep-level physical processes (methane gas release, ocean acidification, etc.) that now possess an ominous life of their own. In these circumstances the word that slides naturally from the tongues of pundits is “apocalyptic.” It strikes many that we are now entering an apocalyptic scenario without precedent in recorded history. My interest here is comparing and contrasting the End Times as envisioned by certain of the faithful and t…
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While the parades of Fat Tuesday, thronged with tourists, are the very definition of New Orleans Mardi Gras in our cultural imagination, the carnival season actually begins on January 6th. One of the early events is the Krewe du Vieux, a parade that is—if such a thing is possible—more transgressive, more out there, than those of the big day. I had heard about one club that marches in Krewe du Vieux, that, as a recent Jewish transplant to the Big…
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What inspired you to write Speak of the Devil? I started writing on The Satanic Temple for Religion Dispatches back in 2013. What most fascinated me about them was that they were taking hypothetical scenarios that had long existed in policy debates such as, “What if Satanists wanted to lead prayer in public school?” and then they were actually doing them. It reminded me of the George Bernard Shaw quote that, “All progress depends on the unreasona…
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…nd a book of essays by the equally lovely and generous poet Gerald Stern waiting in the mailbox. My son opened the package for me, as he likes to do, and I took up a wicker chair on the porch to dip into Stern’s prose. It won’t be long before my son, a teenager, discovers the magic of girls. We worry about helping him navigate the new world he is about to enter. There is some sweet spot between free exploration and healthy and respectful engagemen…
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…, editor of the conservative Christian magazine First Things, said in explaining his support for Donald Trump’s candidacy for president. As Reno explained on the First Things podcast from October 7, regardless of Trump’s profound flaws, “I do think it’s important to support someone who is at least willing to admit that we have really serious problems in our country.” If that were all Trump were willing to do, then he would be a much better candida…
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When Vox published the leaked draft of the Trump Administration’s final interim rule effectively gutting the Affordable Care Act’s so-called birth control mandate last Wednesday, journalists, activists, and even one outspoken nun were quick to blast the rule as a blatant attack on women’s rights and the ability to control their reproductive health. And the 125-page draft rule is certainly an assault on the bodily autonomy of any American who happ…
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…hors to make strong arguments, informed by the best thinking of Western religious traditions. First Things is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life “to confront the ideology of secularism, which insists that…faith has no place in shaping the public conversation or in shaping public policy.” So I was astonished by Mark Regnerus’s laughable piece, “The Death of Eros,” which makes an entirely secular (and frankly tired) argument agai…
Read More…children go on to behave in appalling and harmful ways—like when, in Book II, Augustine steals some pears. Some readers accuse Augustine of overreacting here, making a youthful indiscretion into a grand and lurid sin. But Augustine’s point is exactly that it wasn’t grand or interesting. It was small and stupid. He didn’t need the pears. They weren’t even good. He wasn’t hungry. He didn’t have anything against the owner of the orchard, and he stol…
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