Religion Dispatches
…suffer from the effects of malign theological economics: from the lash of free-market rules and precepts that mirror top-down and gravely mistaken theological concepts. And as someone who has always found the fulminating figure of John the Baptist to be rather attractive, I find myself both humbled and strengthened to learn that Cousin John was stuck in an old and unhelpful paradigm. John thought that enacting a ritual purification in the Jordan…
Read More…otiators the authority to prolong the confrontation with an armed group in Jordan, Montana, until it was defused by intermediaries. Both resolutions advanced the government’s understanding that each group has specific ultimate concerns, myths, forms of enactment, and languages that require expert decoding while the clock is ticking. The latest religious standoff occurred July 21, 2019 at the foot of Mauna Kea, a mountain held sacred by Hawaiian so…
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…ican Whiteness: the gun. For the parents of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, and countless others, the pain of their children’s sacrifice at the hands of the agents of the god of white supremacy in America cannot be healed. We who look upon this madness however, must begin to comprehend the full scope of the underlying issue at hand: America has never simply been land of the free and home of the brave. It is also the h…
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…hocks of Christian theological discourse—for good and for ill. Or, as Mark Jordan has been so helpful in helping me understand (through both his written work and his friendship), the only way to talk about Christian theology in a historical moment when theological language is so tainted with a history of cruelty and inhumane violence is by addressing it indirectly and obliquely. Or, to say it much less elegantly, I didn’t want to write a book that…
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The news item is both grisly and depressingly familiar: a young man is accused of killing an older man for making sexual advances. The weapon was a sock filled with stones; the young man told police that he had been instructed in prayer to apply the Old Testament punishment of stoning. You want to stop there, recognizing old stereotypes of cultural homophobia coupled with age-prejudices—but mostly the unpredictability of violent delusions. Unfort…
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…reedom should be (and, he predicted, will be) “more substantive” about the Free Exercise Clause, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other laws and policies. But not all evangelicals are convinced by Moore’s call for a different sort of rhetoric. Moore, said Keith Miller, an attorney who works for Hillsdale College and contributes to the evangelical blog Mere Orthodoxy, “speaks for a good number of evangelicals who do want a new tone.” But,…
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…s every time its version of Catholic orthodoxy is transgressed. [Read Mark Jordan’s excellent column on Cardinal Newman’s ambiguous sexuality here —ed.] Their Web site includes a handy listing of each institution with its sins and triumphs enumerated. For example, my alma mater, Marquette, is constantly called out for the mere presence of renowned moral theologian Daniel C. Maguire, then lauded for placing in the bottom ten of 139 schools studied…
Read More…clergy who are working within African American churches and communities to promote support for LGBT equality. Families are Forever is a short documentary about the journey of devoted Mormon parents to accept their young teen gay son. Follow the link to watch the trailer, which includes moving clips of Jordan and his parents struggling to come to terms with the messages they sent and he received from the church’s pro-Prop 8 activism. The film is on…
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…d by your encounter with Asian religions. Would you still call yourself a “freelance monotheist?” Or is “freelance religionist” a better moniker? Yes, I wish I had never made that quip about being a freelance monotheist. I drag it around with me wherever I go. What I meant was that at that time I drew nourishment from all three of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and that I could not see any one of them as superior to th…
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…g so long. An evangelical Christian born again in 1994 and baptized in the Jordan river on a 2016 trip to Israel, Dan Patrick believes Americans have put the proverbial cart before the horse. “We cannot heal through commissions and blue-ribbon panels and more laws,” he said. So far, so good. In fact, activists who are serious about systemic racism have been saying for a long time that tweaking policies, scheduling more training sessions, and buyin…
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