Religion Dispatches
…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…
Read More…nomination. The group is connected to Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s plan for a large prayer rally in August. Kaylor emailed me yesterday, after reading my post on how Perry’s effort was reminiscent of Robison’s role in mobilizing conservative Christians in support of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000. Kaylor wrote, “You were correct to connect the news about Perry’s phone call with Robison’s effort in 1980. In fact, the connec…
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…n’s living room in the Oakland hills, I fished in my bag for the tiny microphone I planned to use with my iPhone, to record our conversation. “Is that what you’re using?” he asked, with great interest. He held up his own phone. “I just got one of these. Will this really work?” He sat next to me on the couch as I pointed him through the app store on his phone. “There it is,” I said, pointing to iTalk. “That’s what I’m using.” He tapped the screen,…
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…been saying all along: everybody has spiritual questions, and they need a place to bring them. A place that doesn’t judge them, or expect allegiance like an institution would. After lunch, Bell signed copies of the book. The long line moved slowly, because Bell spent time with everyone, autographing, chatting, posing for photographs. Like Oprah. And as with Oprah, there was something cozy about this process. Bell would chalk this feeling up to the…
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…e, but it isn’t theirs alone. They’ve drawn from community narratives, popular media, popular understandings of science, and widely circulating currents of metaphysical spirituality to build this portrait of a haunting. They’ve interpreted a set of anomalous experiences through their cultural lenses. My research suggests this haunting is typical in the US, and I would suggest that by studying American hauntings, we can better understand the Americ…
Read More…ut how much out-of-state money they’re spending in the hopes of changing Oklahoma’s laws, but I suppose we’ll have to see whether that comes back to bite them.) In any event, SB-1433, Oklahoma’s so-called “personhood” bill was recently passed by the House Public Health Committee. And the comments of Rep. Cox, a member of the committee and one of only two doctors in the entire legislature, display real integrity. Of course, to see why, you have to…
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…e to prove it. The results fall somewhere between playful irreverence and flat-out blasphemy. For example, if the card “A woman must quietly receive ________ with full submission” is played, it could be paired with response cards that include “Crotch-less pants (2 Samuel 10:4),” “The forbidden fruit (Genesis 3),” and “Altar sex (Amos 2:8).” (For the curious, the biblical answer is “instruction,” drawn from 1 Timothy 2:11, a controversial verse sta…
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…t when you look at the occasional major study of African Americans, with a large number of respondents and some white Americans for comparison purposes, the evidence suggests that African Americans are much more religious on average than white Americans in terms of how many hours in a given week they may spend at the church, or how important it is to them, or how often they see church friends, and so forth. That’s an example of white-norming givin…
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…elevant passage from Revelation 13:18: “let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of…
Read More…ts but rather their allies in the relations between the church and the secular population,” says Olga Kazmina, a professor of ethnology at Moscow State University. As if to make the point, a priest who acts as spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church called for a referendum to recriminalize homosexuality in Russia, a move that would dramatically escalate the already worsening persecution of LGBT people in the country. Buzzfeed’s Lester Feder r…
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