Religion Dispatches
…cholars and scientists alike have made a career out of framing religious history as a history of choice. And we, in turn, expect everything to be not just voluntary but also on-demand. But might these everyday acts within our chooser-palooza world occlude from consciousness our acceptance of a tradition that is neither religious nor secular but one that demands that we have a convincing answer to the question of religion? Might these acts of occlu…
Read More…where the “best” place might be for me to work, but a new survey on the “Best Christian Places to Work in the US and Canada” has me thinking. Certainly, as a person of faith who is concerned about the environment, I don’t think I’d pursue a job at a nuclear plant or at a company clear-cutting forests. But, overall, I consider just about any place of employment a great place to be while being a Christian. That said, however, I doubt I could get a j…
Read More…d its attempts to put a human face on the Bernie Madoff saga. One of the most striking features of the reportage are all the family photographs. Each month’s installment is replete with new pictures of the Madoff family in happier times (who in God’s name gave them to the magazine? Friends? For money?…). These pictures have added weight, and create far greater confusion, today. The July installment finally raises the question that hovers over this…
Read More
…ortant new book, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, one of the most striking features of a contemporary Religious Studies department is its easy acceptance of permanent pluralism as the necessary starting point for religious reflection. It’s easy to miss how new, how important, and how startling that starting point really is. Gone are the days when even conservative Christians dream of the eventual “conversion of the Jews” (I leave Bened…
Read More…one pause. But if there is a connection really to be made between Hitler’s statist machine and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities they lie elsewhere, in a few suggestive details. Let’s start with the addresss. Bernie Madoff and his brother occupied three floors of some very prime real estate: the 34-story “Lipstick Building” on Third Avenue. Squillari’s descriptions of the place read like early descriptions of Hitler’s Berlin Chancellory, whe…
Read More
…history of Jewish anti-Zionism, flattening all differences, accepting Zionist historiography as a given, and refusing to acknowledge any other motivations. Hamas threatens Jews, therefore it is antisemitism. SJP challenges Israel, so it too is antisemitic. It’s important to note that all of this is happening just as the ADL is bowing to pressure from a demonstratively antisemitic far-right. Recently, after tepidly pushing for Twitter to address ri…
Read More
…an-American celebration over President-Elect Obama amounted to, “Free at last, free at last—whoa, whoa, [referring to an image of two men holding hands]—where are you two going?” Tragicomic, indeed. I understand that emotions over the passing of Proposition 8 in California are high. Seeing as my household was among those that opposed the measure, I am personally frustrated with the cultural anxiety, ignorance and/or intolerance that animated the v…
Read More
…ican Dictionary in which religion is essentially defined, in solid US-Protestant style, along the lines of a set of beliefs in God. (To give credit where credit is due, the problem also lies with the director Larry Charles and whatever half-baked research team they assembled; and while Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are all susceptible to the same critique, in these pages I’ll confine myself to Religulous.) This is the kind of thing a fair number o…
Read More…retired and older citizens and workers losing their incomes, what’s the fastest, most positive solution to bail these people out of the economic ruin?” Here, certain true colors shone through the haze. Obama said what he has been saying consistently for the past two weeks: his focus is on the long-suffering American middle class, and this crisis points to the need for additional oversight and government regulation of our ailing financial sector,…
Read More
…ants. It’s disappointing, then, that Wuthnow does not venture a more activist stance. After laying out an extended case that pollsters are marketing misleading results—a process called, in less polite company, “deception”—Wuthnow ends with a mild call for “closer and more critical scrutiny” of polls. Hasn’t he just written an entire book doing exactly that? The final line of Inventing American Religion—“much more about religion remains to be under…
Read More