Religion Dispatches
…ons to the formation of “movement” Christianity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then he dropped out, turned his back on that kind of power and glory. He produced low-budget movies for a time, wrote some decent autobiographical fiction, and finally returned to writing about the thing he knows best: the damage wrought by hard, doctrinal religion. One senses from this book that Schaeffer is at last free of the need to strap on his sword and buckle…
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…athers, Benedict contends that the Logos—the divine Word made flesh—in John 1 proves the “inalienable right of Greek thought to a place in Christianity.” While Benedict’s claims about compatibility between Greek philosophy and Christian faith aren’t particularly controversial, his insistence on a unique alliance between Greek thought and Christianity sets the theological backdrop for the Islamophobia and Euro-Christian supremacy seen across his la…
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…l formation along the way of describing his repeated trips to Brazil in the 1930s, his flight from France after the Nazis overran the country in 1940 (he fought in that failed French attempt to hold the Maginot Line against the German Blitz), and his happenstance return to Brazil (he was granted a visa to come to the New School of Social Research in New York, but got held up in French Martinique, and eventually made his way back to Brazil where he…
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…xception. As is his custom, the Pope gave an interview to the press on the flight from Cuba to America. Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service reported that, in response to questions about being a communist and Newsweek‘s “Is the Pope Catholic?” headline, he responded: “I am certain I have never said anything more than what is in the social doctrine of the church. I follow the church and in this, I do not think I am wrong.” That is key to understan…
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…that led to the flight of some one million Jews from Arab countries between 1947 and 1967. When Prime Minister Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, and other right-wing extremists are able to point to this irrational hatred of the Jewish people as the “real” underlying message of the critics of The Occupation, they stir up fears among Israelis that seem to be rationally founded, given the hatred being expressed. All the more so when one witnesses the str…
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…g the Great Depression and the years that followed. Originally published in 1933, Borsodi’s Flight from the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land remains in print today as a practical guide for self-sufficiency, even in the 21st century. In 1954, Scott Nearing and his wife, Helen, published The Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, after Scott left (or was forced out of) academia, relocated to the hills of Verm…
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…cause in the intimacy of communities, in local settings, many people in the 1940s and 50s remembered how the Nazi new order had settled in when the dictatorship took hold in 1933—the way property, power, and position had been seized by the new masters and handed out among friends and allies. After 1945, the task often fell to denazification committees, formed of citizens with clean political records, to interview fellow community members and exami…
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…he made his reputation with works on Kierkegaard and Hegel, and during the 1980s he helped to bring the ideas of Jacques Derrida into American theology and religious studies. Starting in the late 90s, though, Taylor ventured far afield with books on architecture, computer networks, economic markets, and even Las Vegas. In 2006, he released a book of photographs of animal skeletons in the desert. Taylor’s most recent book, After God, gathers these…
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…oft-quoted statement about gay priests—“Who am I to judge?”—occurred on a flight back to Italy from Brazil. Most recently in Tblisi, Georgia, the pope referred to the “theory of gender” as a “great enemy to marriage today.” He added that “there is a global war to destroy marriage,” and that the weapons being used are a form of “idealogical colonization.” In the past, Francis has used that phrase to describe Western ideas being forced onto develop…
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…ter 622, which is to say, per Hirsi Ali’s ‘Reformation,’ it never happened. 1.6 billion Muslims ditching Mecca in favor of Jerusalem would mean 1.6 billion Muslims who would then expect the right to arrive at the Temple Mount for worship, pilgrimage, study, and residence. Great idea! Far from Saudi Arabia holding a commanding position in the Muslim world, a new battle would open up between Fatah, Hamas, Iran, Turkey, and everyone else who claims t…
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