Religion Dispatches
…morning, “It’s hard to reason with an idiot.” Or maybe, it’s just hard to use worldly logic on someone who is divinely inspired. But Ed Kilgore really gets inside Akin’s thinking: Very few if any of the people calling for him to step down supported his very recent primary candidacy; most either backed someone else or hoped he’d lose as the weakest of the potential Republican candidates. He represents a very self-conscious hard-core Christian Righ…
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…alking about the rest of us.) As far as students go, they need to practice noticing and talking about the skills and habits they’re getting in religious studies. They’ll have to articulate these things to their parents and prospective employers. I bet they can do it better than I have. When they do, they’ll be a lot more ready to take over the world, and that will be a good thing. This essay is based on a talk given to Brown University undergradua…
Read More…or of the Senate, asserting that America was on the road to moral ruin because of the separation of church and state. In the speech, Miller backed former Judge Roy Moore (of Ten Commandments fame) and the crafters of the Constitution Restoration Act, which would have stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear Establishment Clause claims. He said: I stand shoulder to shoulder, not only with my Senate cosponsors and Chief Justice Roy Moore of A…
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…ppeals to what governor Scott Walker called “evil”. Americans could indeed use a primer on most world traditions. But what I wonder is how a desire for empathy might square up against the dichotomized language of “evil.” As Amardeep Singh eloquently argues, the hatred directed towards Sikhs might connect to a visceral reaction to embodied religious otherness. How do we move from promoting basic facts to combatting that profane shudder of hatred? T…
Read More…The result, though, is it makes it easier to legally shoot people. Now, I bet you see where this is going. The column is so terrific it really needs to be read in its entirety. Seriously. Read it. But Argento does see a potential downside to the plan. Of course, some people may object because of all of that stuff in the Bible about caring for the poor and being your brother’s keeper and such. They may point to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Je…
Read More…earch editor Wright, the University of Texas has launched its own investigation into the integrity of the study. But politically, the integrity of the study may be beside the point. The Witherspoon Foundation and Bradley Foundation apparently wanted a weapon they could use to fight marriage equality and they got it. It’s a safe bet that the Regnerus study will be cited by religious right groups for years to come, the way they have over the past de…
Read More…mination against a group, then strips it of its language of liberation because the struggle is not the same, down to every last detail, is incomprehensible—and reprehensible. If a group—or class—of people is being blatantly discriminated against not just by churches, but by federal and state governments, and said group, or class, decides to rebel against that discrimination and claim its rightful place as full, tax-paying citizens of the United St…
Read More…: “Amen! I didn’t used to think so but I do now.” We’ve seen Cameron speak out against homosexuality and embrace the far right agenda by speaking at CPAC, but and it remains to be seen if he’ll embrace the rest of the “biblical worldview” promoted by Vision Forum and Christian Reconstruction: biblical patriarchy, eliminating public education, and any public assistance for the poor, etc. In any case I’ll bet that Monumental will be a contender for…
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… It seemed just possible that some of you made more money than I did because you deserved to. You made more money because you had more talent and did more work. Of course, there remained the question of how much more deserving you were, of whether either of us, a freelance scribbler or a Wall Street investor, deserved to occupy a whole other financial galaxy than the attendant who took care of our ailing parents, or the farmer who produced our m…
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…t are now familiar neuralgic issues: ordination, racism, sexuality, power, freedom of conscience. We did so because the U.S. Catholic Bishops were doing what the men in Rome are doing this week: discussing, debating, even voting on women’s issues without women being present, much less involved as equals. The U.S. men had women consultants too, several of whom resigned in the process. I watched a video of the event recently with deep consternation…
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