Religion Dispatches
…ronofsky’s tale is disinvested of tacky teardrops falling from the sky and cheap-trick resurrections. The reason reviewers passed over the religious is not simply, I suspect, because of religious illiteracy, but because of the received wisdom of late-modern culture that continues to dwell on a body-soul dualism, with the soul in power, the body a mere marionette. Several of the religious review sites described Randy’s body in metaphorical terms: R…
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…reformers emptied monasteries 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 “econ…
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…akening or eliminating the contraceptive mandate seems to be a particular priority for the Republicans, probably because contraception is tied to the issue of sexual pleasure, and there are still lots of conservatives who don’t think women should be having non-procreative sex without “paying” for it—either in terms of shouldering their contraceptive costs outside of health insurance or getting pregnant. SB: Is that belief—that women can’t enjoy or…
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…ontradictions between the Gospels and the inevitable selection of which stories to tell—what is striking about Son of God and its marketing campaign is how straightforward it actually is. The film is the opposite of irony and afraid of nuance. Of course, we’ve already had nuance and complexity in the Jesus story—the Scorsese/Kazantakis Last Temptation of Christ—and we saw how well that went. One could object that Jesus, being Divine, is a special…
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…e excluded from the right everybody is supposed to have. Your ministry is primarily with low-income people of color in the South. Can you tell us more about the first-hand negative effects you’ve witnessed due to anti-choice legislation like the Hyde Amendment? The most devastating impact I have personally seen was on a low-income family that already had children and was struggling to make ends meet, but had an unexpected pregnancy. Due to lack of…
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…n intellectuals, Reno’s pro-Trump nihilism is matched only by that of the writer Eric Metaxas. In an October 12 article in the Wall Street Journal, Metaxas writes in apocalyptic terms about a possible Hillary Clinton presidency, assigning her responsibility for things she has no control over, but still claims that “God will not hold us guiltless” if Christians allow her to become president. Never mind the apocalypse a President Trump would unleash…
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…e, thou hast not done, For I have more. It is often said that racism is America’s original sin, but there is another like unto it, which is our freedom. It is the sin where we begun. Throughout 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 o…
Read More…insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the right jumped right on it. Here’s Sean Hannity back in January on his radio show: Why should Americans be paying the $9 a month for birth control pills that you can get at Wal-Mart? Why should—especially Catholics and people of faith, and Christians and people of other faiths that this is against their religious teachings … why should other people be buying others’ birth co…
Read More…insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the right jumped right on it. Here’s Sean Hannity back in January on his radio show: Why should Americans be paying the $9 a month for birth control pills that you can get at Wal-Mart? Why should—especially Catholics and people of faith, and Christians and people of other faiths that this is against their religious teachings … why should other people be buying others’ birth con…
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…yer, and eliminationism. Religion Dispatches: You begin the book talking primarily about the excesses of media personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter. What do you say to the claim of Limbaugh and others that they are just entertainers? Neiwert: Sure, if political propaganda can pass as entertainment, and it certainly has in the past, I’d go along with that. But they are political propagandists first and foremost. That t…
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