Religion Dispatches
…er? Likewise the atheists who delivered the opening prayer at the infamous Greece, New York, town meeting, after courts ruled that such prayer was somehow legal. The fact that it was atheist prayer seemed meant to “prove a point,” and that point, to me, was that New Atheists have become just another religious sect, and they should get off their high horse. (Note: atheists get REALLY MAD when you say this.) But now that SCOTUS has ushered in a new…
Read More
…deniable that many of these changes were triggered by the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from Africa, North Africa, and Asia; as a result, cultural and religious institutions in Europe are facing many serious challenges. And yet even if this central assumption is true and Caldwell’s overall analysis of cultural and demographic evolution of Europe is correct, the author examines the questions within the primitive trappings of “The Green Per…
Read More
…Poland and Lithuania in the early modern period, and into the Middle East, Greece, Russia, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire by the nineteenth century. The famous so-called Damascus Affair of 1840, which saw Jewish leaders from Western Europe defend Syrian Jews from the blood libel, stimulated treatises by anti-Semitic agitators, along with scholars who defended Jews and pseudo-scholars who falsely claimed that Jewish texts support ritual murder. Th…
Read More
…g religious and civic festivities. The male athletic body, nude in ancient Greece, fully clad with extra padding and a helmet in contemporary American football, dominates the field in sports and, though competition may verge on the erotic for some (both then and now), it is generally framed in militaristic rather than sexual terms. The breast crossed a line for many viewers and spectators, who were stunned at what was frequently perceived to be an…
Read More…ew Testament accorded the title of a church leader. The Orthodox Church in Greece ordains women as deacons. If you’re less progressive than them, you have to know you’re out on a limb. But set even that aside. The conservative SBC leaders would also really rather you didn’t notice the evidence from their own church. Women have been ordained by Southern Baptist congregations. The policy against women in ministry has evolved over time. There are som…
Read More
…the same privileges enjoyed by the Christian establishment. Following the Greece v. Galloway decision, which authorized public prayers before government events, Chaz Stevens of Florida offered to open a town council meeting with a prayer to Satan. In response, conservative pastor Mark D. Boykin asserted that the first amendment applies only to religions “like Christianity” and not “malevolent and evil” religions. Boykin added that Satanism is “th…
Read More
…s to their traditional geographical homelands, such as Russia, Serbia, and Greece. Eastern Orthodoxy was historically a faith of immigrants in the U.S; however, in the last thirty-plus years, it’s become a haven for deeply conservative American converts who are fed up with what they see as progressive secularism invading Western Christianity. Certainly, there are more extreme converts than Hodges. Matthew Heimbach, who’s now been excommunicated fr…
Read More
…nities in which I participate, my Facebook newsfeed has a disproportionate number of people who are both passionately liberal and deeply religious. So it didn’t take very long—especially on a Sunday, when what else should a person do besides post videos on Facebook?—for this interview to spread like wildfire. The video was shared with the headline “The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done,” and was, in my newsfeed, invariably accompa…
Read More
…eum) were recently forced to send a lot of Greek works of art back, not to Greece, but to Rome. It’s all a bit bewildering, but fascinating at the same time. Which leads me to a second project, a book about the Greek island of Crete where I excavated for five years. I want to use Cretan history as a way to illustrate a very different way of conceptualizing identity, a more cosmopolitan way, than the one promoted by multiculturalism. Odysseus’s f…
Read More
…ir multi-national, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character. That said, the numbers of nations and people that we mention are sourced solely on the claims of the groups themselves. We have no way to independently verify these numbers, so they should be used advisedly. Simply put, the global vision of the NAR is based on their understanding of the Great Commission text of Matthew 28:18-20, with an emphasis on “discipling nations” (28:19). Internatio…
Read More