Religion Dispatches
…t studying religion. Early on, 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…
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…Prize-winning play that the film Doubt is based on bears the subtitle “A Parable,” which begs the question: what’s it a parable about? The priests and nuns of this tale are people, to be sure, but they’re also symbols, while the axis around which the story turns is ecclesiastical power. John Patrick Shanley’s first film since the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle Joe Versus the Volcano addresses many of the American Catholic Church’s gravest concerns of…
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…ty over the entirely of the Land of Israel. While there are considerable gradations in the Settler Movement (some of it is secular and there are less strident forms of its religious branch), its religious ideology is loosely based on these core principles. Settler Zionism has been enormously successful but it always had a population problem. Its longterm success depends on creating sufficient “facts on the ground” in order to prevent any peace agr…
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…as moving through a typical press briefing when she was asked about the escalation of violent rhetoric in public discourse. The California Democrat suddenly became uncharacteristically emotional, requesting that people tone it down, and recalling the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk as an outgrowth of the hate-filled discourse of its time. Warning that people might have to “take respons…
Read More…These are big words — hope, forgiveness and peace. They rarely have the megaphone that the party of “nope” enjoys. Nevertheless, they are words that religious people need to protect with all our hearts and souls. We too need a department of homeland security and its job is to protect our words. Let’s start with hope. When a tragedy happens, it often steals our hope. The 9-11 bombing is a terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy with causes in a larger hu…
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…date for expiration draws closer. Taking the misleading line that the long-awaited expiration of the partial tax holiday enjoyed by the top 2% of households amounts to an intolerable new tax hike, Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch lashes out at expiration as a “job killer.” Already the handicappers are giving odds on how much the White House will end up conceding to the braying anti-tax forces. This looming fight offers a tremendous teachable moment fo…
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…ome, further weakening the fragile Jewish majority. If you ask ministers Isaac Herzog (Labor) or Gideon Sa’ar (Likud), however, they will give you another answer. The Jewish state has a special obligation to the foreigner, to the sojourner in a land that is not his. The Jew must remember his history, first in Egypt and later in other exiles, of being a guest in another people’s land. Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel pleaded with Is…
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…ethod is terribly mistaken. Boycotts are an important tool that people use against businesses and the government policies that support them. If one plays the role of a consumer, then of course one’s most powerful recourse is not to consume. But using that same logic against the mass is to misunderstand what should make the Church distinctive in the first place, as a community, an institution, and—if I may say so—the bride of Christ on Earth. Accor…
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…multi-million-dollar Frontline/American Experience production God in America aired on PBS. Now the debate over its merits begins. Reviews from journalists have been mostly positive, although New York Times television critic Mike Hale was not totally impressed. The show, he wrote, was “stuffed with facts and dates and figures” and sometimes strained “to find a way to tie them together.” He also called it “an unusually serious and, to use a word the…
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…total sobriety is required. Eight weeks into a public health and economic catastrophe, the facts before us should be sobering enough: Disease and death in this pandemic overwhelmingly afflict communities of color (e.g. despite making up just a third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbers are 14% and 40% respectively, etc). The crisis has already condemned low-income families to a…
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