Religion Dispatches
…us from the military: ”I would tell them to serve anyway,” [Sergeant First Class Benjamin] Ratcliff replied. “If all men of courage and men that had a moral compass were to leave the military, then we wouldn’t have a military. There would be nobody left to serve and protect. So I don’t really—I would serve regardless of what comes out of Washington.” But, not letting facts get in the way of a good scare, Perkins – faced with a Democratic commitmen…
Read More…t time I’ve been on a plane where 50% of the seats are business- and first-class. Sorta gives you an idea who comes to the Kingdom, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike: big business. Okay, so the flight is not exclusive to hajjis, but when we arrive they announce for us hajjis to remain on the plane and disembark last. Let the other passengers, many whom will transfer to domestic flights, get off first. Well, if the rest of us are hajjis, we don’t…
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…in was Mr. Potter, a greedy and corrupt banker who referred to the working class as “a discontented lazy rabble.” (Wow. Sound familiar to anyone else?) And while the movie features a strong element of divine intervention, it is only of the most passive kind. As you may recall, Clarence the Angel’s only accomplishment is to point out George Bailey’s lifetime of good works and active commitment to “social justice,” something that Beck has said are c…
Read More…ACE, at this time—but then that is the gist of it really. Short of one’s individual experience with Allah, what you cannot duplicate anywhere else is this ardent devotion coming together with other devotees, the “macro-communication factor,” as Nasr Abu Zayd referred to it. Okay, so there is love of the Ka’abah, love of the mosque, love between family and friends, well, think then about the salah! Personally, I should add, I already love the salah…
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…were going to sound yet more unattainable, I would point to the Princeton class of ’48 poets, Galway Kinnell and W. S. Merwin. What’s your next book? I am toying with three topics: The first is to play out the history of the study of religion in American culture—not so much as a history of the discipline, but as a history of a broad area of inquiry and fascination, again for amateurs as much as bona fide professionals. This is a project at an ea…
Read More…dom tire of pointing out, the God of the Bible is quite partisan and quite divisive. You can’t read about camels and the eye of the needle, let alone the Magnificat, without understanding that God is on the side of the poor. If the religious left (such as it is) wants to be effective on economic issues—tax cuts, employment, child nutrition—it’s going to have to learn to take sides too. It’s going to have to say: My God is the God of the poor. Some…
Read MoreThe incoming class of congressional freshmen includes, Jaime Herrera (R-WA), the first homeschooled member ever, and Daniel Webster (R-FL) a homeschooling activist about whom I’ve written here and here. In a press release celebrating the “coming of age” of homeschooling, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine poses the question: “Is Homeschooling Good for America?” which they answer by touting the culturally transformative character of the homeschooling mo…
Read More…ment. “The broad consensus reflected in this letter—across great religious divides—is clear: The law of marriage is not about imposing the religion of anyone, but about protecting the common good of everyone,” said Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, newly elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and one of the letter’s signers. “People of any faith or no faith at all can recognize that when the law defines m…
Read More…d their proxies, no County funds are being directed into the defense of Proposition 8. But with recent polling showing that a majority of Latino Catholics now support marriage equality (as we’ve reported here at RD), one wonders whether the working-class (and deeply unemployed) Latino majority of Imperial County is setting the moral agenda or whether they’re being played by a highly motivated set of outsiders with no longterm interest in the welfa…
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…as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost pai…
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