Religion Dispatches
…the fossil-fueled time that takes humans “out of this world,” and re-ground them in these ambiguous, multiple, planetary times, we can begin to think about and co-construct post-pandemic worlds that are more about the flourishing and resilience of the entire planetary community….
Read More…y more polarized today than it was in, say, 1978. I know that anti-science runs amok in churches today. I read about it every day. But because the churches I’ve attended have been neither conservative nor reactionary, and because I’ve spent the large majority of my adult years on university campuses, I don’t have any direct exposure to life in anti-science congregations. Have any of you left the church (or a church) mainly because of its antagonis…
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…who remember and revere traditional Catholic social teaching (especially Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens, pro-union encyclicals issued by Popes Leo XIII and John Paul II respectively). These staunch Catholic friends of labor are usually joined by some liberal Jews and liberal Protestants. But moderate and evangelical Protestants? Among the white ones, not so much. White evangelicals have even been known to create their own entities (e.g., the C…
Read More…that Trump picked Pence to solidify his bona fides with evangelicals. And Trump really only cares about a handful of issues: infrastructure spending, trade, manufacturing, immigration, and foreign policy. He is happy to outsource much of the agenda around social policy, which includes all the culture war issues like abortion, LGBT rights and “religious liberty,” to Pence and his allies. Pence has deep roots as a culture warrior. When President Geo…
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…a Muslim, I condemn Ebola.” But it’s not the Afflecks or the Mahers of the world we need to write about. I am far more concerned about how our creative energies are wasted reacting to this endless provocation. As a Muslim, I’m exhausted. You may think that what plagues Muslims today is a rowdy minority of gung-ho militants in the desert of Iraq and Syria. I think our problem is more subtle than that. We have convinced ourselves, and others, that w…
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…sh” was a liability and anti-semitism was palpable, the number of non-Jews today who identify as Jewish seems historically distinctive. We could, perhaps, point to the so-called “fearers of heaven,” an undocumented community of Hellenes in late antiquity who lived in large Jewish population centers, apparently lived partially as Jews, and had some status in the Jewish community. But today’s non-Jewish Jews aren’t identifying as such because they l…
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…f the art museum as a social signifier fully embedded in an haut bourgeois world, one in which Sweeney could form strategic alliances but never a lasting arrangement.” And yet, even as he was being asked to step down or was pushed out the door, Sweeney was winning awards, celebrated as a visionary, and congratulated for the civic renaissances in each of the cities where he worked. Such accolades perhaps offer us reasons for cautious optimism as we…
Read More…the promoters of the Park51 project had agreed to move it to a different location, Sharif El-Gamal, Chairman and CEO of SoHo Properties, which owns the site, today issued this statement to RD: It is untrue that the community center known as Park51 in lower Manhattan is being moved. The project will proceed as planned. What is being reported in the media today is a falsehood. …
Read More…fabricated scandal isn’t going away anytime soon, though. It’s a perfect crucible for interrelated Republican cause celebres that all serve as election season fodder: that the Obama administration “promotes abortion;” that contraceptives are like a gateway drug for abortion; and that the Obama administration is depriving the Catholic Bishops of their religious liberty. But the Democrats could easily turn this around on the Republicans. Should rap…
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…mented memory of supersessionism at their disposal, Catholic intransigents today never tire of calling out this uneasy disjunction between a dense supersessionist past and a shallow progressivist present. Finally, what does the Orthodox Presbyterian rejection of moves like the Vatican’s decision to squelch supersessionism tell us? Does it warn of an excess of theological subtlety and complexity? Does it speak to an appetite of the popular religiou…
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