Religion Dispatches
…t loss. On Saturday night, a gunman in a central Florida nightclub took 49 mostly young, mostly brown, mostly gay lives. I marvel at the brief biographies of the dead I have seen, how many of them floated to Orlando from distant points as though it were their own personal Samarra. It seems a twisted necessity of God to require their souls so abruptly in a place of joy and refuge, a cruel grace that more than a few died with friends and partners. T…
Read More
…al protein could have evolved by random chance. And if a protein—a complex molecule, but just a molecule nonetheless—could not have evolved by chance, then an entity as complex as a cell could certainly not have evolved, let alone an organism. All of this leads up to Axe’s main and final point, when he makes a jump from biology to metaphysics: because life could not have evolved by chance, all living beings must have been created by an intelligent…
Read More
…ose narratives have now become so pervasive that even in spaces where it’s mostly black folks or mostly poor folks, you’ll still hear that as a response. You’ve mentioned earlier that many politicians—even those that tout themselves as progressive—will support the legal right to an abortion, while denying poor women access to the procedure. How do you feel this hypocrisy represents the intersection of sexism, racism and classism? The Hyde Amendmen…
Read More
…gs, wrote in 2005 that the secularization thesis—the idea that as cultures modernize, they become less religious—had been “debunk[ed]” and that the American secular revolution might be facing an antisecular “counterrevolution.” Only a few years later, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, conservative Christian intellectuals were telling the exact opposite story. The writer Rod Dreher now laments the “exiling of Christianity from public life.” Ren…
Read More
…e willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms of capitalism in more and more blatant ways. In this, SoulCycle has a lot in common with prosperity gospel preachers, ethical consumption marketers, and other moneymakers testing the frontiers of luxury and soulfulness. Let’s not be naïve: spirituality has been profitable for a very, very long time. In one of the most well known stories of the New Testament, Jesus drives the money changers…
Read More
…certain critical mass is necessary for their institutions to thrive. While most monks undoubtedly do not wish to return to the huge, pre-1959 monastic populations, and while they deplore the excesses of what has been termed “the mass monasticism of the old society,” monks object to the current size limits imposed on them by the government. They see this as a violation of the rights of young Tibetan men to enter the religious life, as an infringeme…
Read More
…the “Reichsbürger” movement, a German version of the “sovereign citizens’ movement.” Both movements refuse to pay taxes or accept government authority, and have demonstrated a willingness to use violent force, as well as the belief in conspiracy theories. Reichsbürger believe that Germany, rather than being an independent country, is actually still governed by the United States; that it’s not a country but a company (I won’t go into the absolutel…
Read More
…ging compatibility between Jewishness and belief in Jesus as the messiah. Among religiously-affiliated Jews, the ultra-Orthodox said yes most often—although that only included 35% of respondents. That percentage decreases steadily as you pass through degrees of observance: 33% of Modern Orthodox Jews; 28% of Conservative Jews. Of all Jewish subpopulations, Reform Jews were the least likely to accept any compatibility, doing so at the rate of just…
Read More
…hildren,” “believe the children” rhetoric has conservative LDS members and Mormon fundamentalists and lefty white celebrities all on the same page and not realizing that this is a Q event. Looping back to what you stated previously about how people often frame something like QAnon as religious when they really mean irrational, how do you reconcile that statement with QAnon at the same time being a product—or an absurd outcome—of the New Christian…
Read More
…le you’re a complete monster. That’s even more the case these days, when “amoral monster” is less an over-the-top exaggeration than speaking the truth with a flourish when describing certain residents of Pennsylvania Avenue in the Federal District of Columbia. Leadership’s so bad these days we’re probably hatching a new generation of sociopaths around the nation. They’ll be the ones who grew up watching Fox News. A young guy looking to make a fast…
Read More