Religion Dispatches
…ans pay conscious, indeed religious tribute, to Caesar and Mars . . . And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage and hope of many.” Cynicism is understandable, and despair more so. But instead of siding with cheap, whitewashed nostalgia, let us note that certain moments in the past remind us of the future that may yet still be achieved….
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…r the children of atheist lesbian couples are simply not welcome here. The cheap paperback Easter stories read by Sanders and Conway—no doubt ordered the day before from Amazon Prime—had nothing to do with teaching, or welcoming, or even celebrating a Christian holiday (inappropriate as that itself would have been at a White House event). As this administration did with its craven and phony defense of “Merry Christmas” as if it were an endangered…
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…steries and convents, what they celebrated about marriage were friendship, parenthood, and sexual discipline; as Paul famously wrote, “it’s better to marry than to burn.” Apart from seeing the demise of sex as a problem, Regnerus’s argument further distinguishes itself from Christian thought by calling upon Gary Becker’s ideas about “marriage markets” to demonstrate why gender equality is ruining sex. According to this “economic way of looking at…
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…the relief among the many young women and people with uteruses I knew was palpable. For many people who use birth control not just for contraceptive purposes, but for health problems like endometriosis, knowing an employer couldn’t opt out of coverage was a breath of fresh air. My monthly birth control that I take for a medical condition went from $45 per month (not chump change for a young, broke person) to zero. Knowing that in the future, my h…
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…ued that American Christians were selling out their religious identity for cheap political gain, and that they could help ensure their religious integrity if they took that identity off the market altogether by concealing it in public life. This approach would take seriously Jesus’ advice to pray in secret and to give alms without letting “your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3-6). It also would follow an undercurrent in C…
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…idea of heightened purity that became ingrained in the way we did church. Patriarchy is patriarchy, and sometimes we forget it operates within cultures of color in the same way it operates everywhere else. In terms of white politicians, it’s the same mentality that existed in slavery: your body does not belong to you, and we get to tell you what you can and cannot do with it. They can’t do it directly now because they don’t own people anymore, bu…
Read More…iage. He even used the occasion of 9/11 to compare children who lost their parents that day with gay parents because “everybody who is under that redefined marriage will lack either a mommy or a daddy and that is morally wrong.” But, using your wife’s death to score a few cheap political points against a group of people you hate isn’t “morally wrong”? But wait, there’s more! Garlow also uses his dead wife to point out just how fake the relationsh…
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…doing. He will carry you out of the burning building of your own fear and pain and get you home safely. Despite Axe’s passionate call-to-action, heroes are actually not badly needed. But friends are. Good friends don’t need to be particularly heroic, pious, smart, strong, or good. They’re not free of fear or uncertainty. Rather, they’re just attentive enough to their own fears and uncertainties to support others who are facing the same. Unlike th…
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…ut our nation’s history, we have untied the knots of oppression only to be paralyzed by the choices of others, as if by snakebite. There is no magic or mystery in this. A friend reminds me that in rural areas, guns are symbols of independence, of taking care of your own, of putting meat on the table. Country people shy at the thought of giving up their rifles because they feel unheard and neglected by distant power, she says. I believe her; I know…
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…no, I don’t buy that. The way I always define the divine is the rising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away or, as I have already suggested, the infinite creative process. There isn’t a divine creator, but creativity is divine. Creativity is an emergent process, and creation always entails destruction. I’ve rethought this in terms of these complex information-processing because I think all these systems are basically distribut…
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