Religion Dispatches
…I’ve written before about how Romney’s public pronouncements on the Israel-Palestine conflict are out of touch with non-apocalyptic, contemporary Mormon thinking, but still, he’s never discussed his own beliefs on the end-times, or disagreements, if any, with LDS doctrine. Apocalyptic beliefs are a Republican problem, though, not just a Romney problem; for example, George W. Bush, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee are all evangelical…
Read More…the title is more simplistic and flashy than the actual video, which gave Answers in Genesis (AiG)—a silly but earnest creationist outfit that’s unpopular even with many creationists—the opportunity to get even more simplistic and flashy by connecting it to one of Richard Dawkins’ reductive rants in which he contends that religion is a form of child abuse. You might be surprised to learn that what Nye actually said was sincere, gentle, and far mo…
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…atheist.” In this way Bowie was representative of that sort of theological freedom through which the most interesting questions can be asked, and possibly through which some of the most interesting answers may be found. He is a model for taking what we need and leaving the rest; a type of can-do pragmatism and religious anarchism. There will be many lists of Bowie’s greatest songs in the next few days; no doubt your social media feeds are already…
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…wo main struggles are with her need for perfection and with the persistent feeling of being out of place in every scene; both are common afflictions for those who have been indoctrinated with the belief that one must fit into the sinless “good Christian” mold in order to be snatched up by God at the End of Days. The result of such indoctrination is that Bauer makes impossible demands of herself. She seeks infallibility from God, her partner, and h…
Read More…vangelical Christianity-now-Catholic Glenn Beck: nominal-Catholic-converted-to-Mormonism Of course, conventional wisdom holds that the moderates are a secular movement, as some once said of the Tea Party. Let me offer another hypothesis. What the Tea Party affiliated-folks seem to share is a religious rhetoric (if not worldview) animated by crisis. As in crisis conversion. Spiritual warfare. End-times. Push the reset button. Start over. What the m…
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…g the nation’s moral agenda” since 2005. It’s how they claim a broad middle-of-the-road mandate, as though political polarization were only a factor of extremists on either end of the spectrum, rather than a soul-sucking force quickly subsuming all of American society. They’ve been trying to claim the centrist mandate by saying this for ten or twelve years, too: Frustrated by Christian conservatives’ focus on reversing liberal successes in legaliz…
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…n a man and a woman, and, besides, there were no same-sex marriages in the New Testament world. Mark and Matthew present Jesus’s teaching as a narrowly defined discussion pertaining to the interpretation of a law in Deuteronomy. The texts don’t reject gay marriage; they don’t even address it. Matthew’s Jesus does, however, recognize nonbinary gender in the grand finale of his teaching on divorce in a verse that conservatives routinely omit. After…
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…tem. So it’s about names, clothing, the presentation of the body—these hard-to-change markers. Religion was once used to place people into social hierarchies, before the concept of race was created. When I’m speaking of racialization, I’m speaking of somebody not knowing anything about somebody’s religious practices, but making assumptions about them based on the way that they present themselves. It’s revealing that Sikh men have been racialized a…
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…her than confronting the asymmetrical realities of the Black experience vis-à-vis Jewish whiteness. After the condemnation of DeSean Jackson and Nick Cannon subsides and the attention of the media moves on to the next outrage, African Americans and white American Jews will still be left with the unresolved problem of race and chosenness that won’t be solved through dueling recriminations of “white Jewish world dominance” and “Black anti-Semitism.”…
Read More…us liberty,” but that their position is immutable because it comes from you-know-who. By that count, Donald Trump’s disastrous performance at last night’s Al Smith dinner was itself the logical endgame of the bishops’ long-term meddling in politics. While the dinner is often cast as a light-hearted charity event, a chance for the opposing presidential nominees to show their civility and rise above partisanism, nothing could be further from the tru…
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