Religion Dispatches
…vies shape how people, especially children, view the world. In the case of New Orleans and the myriad of cultures it holds, to stint on all of the facets that make New Orleans and Louisiana the wonderful, complex, and sometimes exasperating place that it is is a crime. Disney’s princesses, once again, may have big beautiful eyes, but while kids are enjoying the view, Disney’s hack job of deconstructing history by making it “cute” is just as destru…
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…er the last twenty years has been marked by decline and retrenchment, this new data indicates that one trait of the new public face of religion is what we might call a generous rootedness in tradition. And if these roots—as the Pew data suggest—do not hinder but actually strengthen Americans’ abilities to reach across religious borders to work together for the common good, these findings mark indeed a promising way forward for a country as religio…
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…and most often pushes aside the older. The Qur’an marks progress over the New and Old Testaments of the Bible, as the New Testament improves upon the Old. Islam replaces Christianity as Christianity replaces Judaism, and so on. (This is not to say that all or even most Christians, Jews and Muslims believe this, but it is undoubtedly a part of those traditions.) Typically overlooked by the players in this game of religious “leapfrog” is the fundam…
Read More…ss, tell remarkably similar stories of Israeli soldier-assassins who start new lives in New York. By normalizing the image of soldiers and patriots leaving Israel, The Zohan and Restless (like Steven Spielberg’s weightier Munich [2005] both normalize the difficult questions of post-Zionism. Restless, directed by Amos Kollek (son of the longtime mayor of Jerusalem), depicts the reunion of Moshe, a down-and-out Israeli poet in New York, and Tzach, t…
Read More…d cause riots on the streets in big cities across America. According to OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmons’ American Family Association, Corbin “contends there is potential for public riots the night of or after the election, if Obama’s lead in the polls does not translate into victory.” “I don’t think that’s something that we’ve looked at very closely, and I think that this could be a powder keg here as we get towards that day…
Read More…and response to the situation of the day. It may therefore be read as the new (or newly reelected) president’s sermon to the nation, presenting his understanding of the American creed, setting the tone for his administration and its policies, and attempting to mobilize the audience to support his proposals and his vision. Since Barack Obama is one of the most religiously voluble and theologically sophisticated of modern American politicians, I wa…
Read More…new volcanic island erupts in the Galápagos chain. Suddenly an expanse of new, un-colonized land is available; new food sources will grow there. How will this new land affect finch diversification? That’s the kind of question being addressed here. But in the rush to deadline, the media all too often misses the point. And instead of an writing about an exploration of the different ways mass environmental changes impact life’s diversity, it comes o…
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…s Fraser, a philosophy professor at Oxford, complained on Twitter that the New College of the Humanities was a “new atheist school.” The Church Mouse, a popular Christian blogger, suspects that it will shut out religious students and faculty: It seems difficult to imagine how they would consider the CV of a religious professor seriously when looking to fill teaching roles. And how would they respond to a student candidate in an interview who profe…
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…he Right has wanted for decades. Those not on the solid Right have found a new cause, and that should be celebrated. But that new cause is also quite telling. It’s telling us that, in a sense, the country has largely moved on from the Occupation. The settlers have won, even with these protests—and they’re likely to continue winning because they’ve changed the parameters of the conversation. To borrow an American football phrase, they’ve “moved the…
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…hments to its own images. In his 2002 book, Iconoclash, Latour writes: We knew (I knew!) we had never been modern, but now we are even less so: fragile, frail, threatened; that is, back to normal, back to the anxious and careful stage in which the “others” used to live before being “liberated” from their “absurd beliefs” by our courageous and ambitious modernization. Suddenly, we seem to cling with a new intensity to our idols, to our fetishes, to…
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