Religion Dispatches
…ion claims that it promotes “Constitutionalist Judicial Nominees,” told OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, that the “Ten Commandments would be removed all over the place. ‘Under God’ would be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. The death penalty would be banned. There’d probably be constitutional rights to all sorts of new things like human cloning and physician-assisted suicide. Racial preferen…
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…moments of challenge and crisis—in those darkest of hours—the dawning of a new age is only made possible by those who would dare to imagine a new world. Not those who rest on a blessed assurance. Not those who assume that everything will be taken care of in the end. No. King understood that any new age obliges us to work. As he said in 1957, I have talked about the new age which is fastly coming into being. I have talked about the fact that God is…
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…ly “welcomed” us. I hope that no gay or lesbian person makes the mistake of believing that Haggard has changed and is really “welcoming” them to his new church. Meet the new charlatan, just the same as the old charlatan….
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…e of analysis that I find more troubling. McWhorter deems wokeness to be a new religion. Had he simply declared wokeness a new ideology or simply stayed with his third-wave antiracism construct we could have simply debated the merits of his argument. Yet his declaration of wokeness as religion serves not as honest assessment of religious thinking in the form of social justice activism. Instead, religion is invoked as a ready-made punching bag for…
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…cerns itself with anecdotes, anthropology, and economics, informing us how new connections are organically emerging—in astonishing number—between rising Arabs, looking to invest massive sums of wealth in new markets, and risen China, a positive model for socially stable growth. These links involve much more than oil alone (Simpfendorfer makes much of the place of Islam in these relationships), but oil has produced the hundreds of billions that now…
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…t critic James Wood’s recent, provocative essay/review of Terry Eagleton’s new book, itself a broadside against the New Atheists, in particular Richard Dawkins. Readers who are scholars of religion were puzzled, too. What exactly are Wood’s own views, and what do they tell us about the way “religion” is regarded by certain public intellectuals? Since we are already riding piggyback here, I will ignore Eagleton’s and Dawkins’ books in order to expo…
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…ent of the obfuscation and blame-shifting when I realized that the bulk of new philanthropy going on in New York in the 1990s—an interventionist philanthropy very much focused on support for the deserving poor—was being initiated by committed Democrats. One fast-rising new charity raised staggering amounts from hip young Democratic money managers at its annual galas. It spelled out its approach in big bold letters for all to see: no, we do NOT fun…
Read More…ool Aid” and I don’t use that term lightly. I’ve believed since my trip to New Birth back in 2010, when Long promised to fight his civil case, that New Birth was a cult-like organization. Long’s hold over his congregation reminds me of Jim Jones. That may sound harsh, but Jim Jones slept with his members too, before leading the People’s Temple into the jungles of Guyana. Long however, is in interesting historical company. After all, Father Divine …
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…ople would also read. I have been inspired by the marvelous writers of the New Yorker, and so I tried to write the book with some of the literary qualities of the best non-fiction I read in that magazine (as I was also filling my head with academic writing). In sum, I thought of my audience as a New Yorker audience—educated, but not necessarily academics or specialists. You have a pretty strong critique of Melville Herskovits and his pathbreaking…
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…de (aka “Dudeism”), a religion based on the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski and Oprah Winfrey is arguably the most important national spiritual leader. That is why the Grateful Dead is not just a band, but also a new American religious community. And “Truckin’” is not just a song, but also sacred text extolling the value and virtue of a new American pilgrimage, a journey that is at once physical, spiritual, and musical….
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