Religion Dispatches
…changed our idea of what a viable political candidate is. Toss in some populist outrage and the ability to have all news filtered through liked-minded pundits and bloggers and you get the toxic environment from which Sharkey emerged. “The Impaler” arose during the Bush Administration, seeking popular appeal by promising to kill an unpopular president. And while he has continued this strategy during the Obama era, sadly he no longer seems nearly as…
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…s like Samuel Colt, Oliver Winchester, and Richard Gatling are high on the list of America’s industrial pioneers. Their products, along with other famous gun names, have become icons in the history of American technology. When gun owners talk about their love for these marvelous machines, there is sometimes a palpably erotic tone to their words and voices. Which leads to another obviously masculine virtue so often associated with guns: virility. T…
Read More…ontexts. As a thumbnail sketch of what big “R” Religion is all about, this list of goods is admirably clear. But for precisely that reason it begs the question against Sullivan and others who speak for the equal dignity of citizens whose lives do not aim at the alleged goods of ineffability, salvation, or transcendence. What reason is there to think that the goods on Koppelman’s list and only these goods are worthy of protection? For those opposed…
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…tion here. Clark’s work comes from the archives of the Afro-Creole Spiritualist group Cercle Harmonique from 1858 to 1877. By focusing on Afro-Creole Spiritualism in New Orleans, we get an extended, as well as intimate, look at how one very particular group, mostly men and free people of color, envisioned their ideal society through the voices of spirit mediums. In doing so, they drew from French thinkers and historical experiences (including ever…
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…tates, nor have there been any Iranian or Iraqi terrorists. Donald Trump’s list of banned nations is comprised of nothing more than the most vulnerable of Muslim countries, six of whom we’ve bombed or used in proxy wars. Like all bullies, he has found a soft and weak target to point his finger at. Some may take heart that his order only focuses on a small number of countries, but if his authoritarian tendencies remain consistent, then we should kn…
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…r of the book. When the publishers presented the idea to me, I gave them a list of all the memoirs without the author’s face on the cover. They gave me a comparable list of memoirs that have the author’s face on the cover. Between the Atlanta-based photographer Anne Simone and cover designer Brad Norr, I felt confident that they could put together something appropriate and poignant. The photo on the cover was caught between posed pictures when I g…
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…en rough contemporaries like Toni Morrison and Cornel West, to this august list of American spiritualists-in-letters—was ultimately a psalmist of the human spirit. He was, as we would now say, “spiritual (or sacred), not religious.” But then, in his judgment, that’s what democracy is all about. The very coin of the democratic realm is “sacred.” Whitman saw the work of fostering such a “religious democracy” as the work of the 20th century, and tha…
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…raceptive mandate for any reason, which has long been on the bishops’ wish list, but have a history of attacking contraception in general. Katy Talento, who is now a White House domestic policy aide, has warned of the (false) health risks of oral and other hormonal contraceptives, charging that they are carcinogens, ruin women’s fertility and cause miscarriages. And, like the bishops, she suggests that natural family planning, which has the highes…
Read More…d authored a book called, Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. Leo emailed Hardy to let her know of the connection, but noted that she had not actually read the book. Hardy said that was good enough for her and made a motion to remove the book from a proposed reading list. Hardy has been trying to pare down the lengthy proposed reading list. Except that it was a different Bill Martin, a DePaul University philosophy professor….
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…Tarbell, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, Eleanor Roosevelt—it’s a very long list of reformers and independent thinkers. These are all WASPy names, as you may have noticed. I now want to add that in the American context, some of the greatest “Protestants” (in terms of freedom and spirit) have been anything but WASPy: I am thinking here of Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter and Benjamin Cardozo. And of Peter Zenger and Carl Schurz and John Peter Al…
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