Religion Dispatches
…se the Absolute for the contingent. I made that mistake before. I think a fair number of Muslims have, and may still be doing so. I wrote this so that they might know: You’re not alone in the struggle. But I also wrote it for that dentist on the airplane, with whom I shared so much in common. You might only hear ugly things about Islam, and depressing things about Muslims. But we are so much more than that. _________________________ The Faith Th…
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…aft accusations did not involve carnal relations with the Devil, nocturnal flight, or being able to fall down stairs without sustaining injury. Though they imputed magical evildoing, the accusations mostly involved more mundane human problems, like suspicion, resentment, and festering doubt. This characteristic aligns with what anthropologists and historians who work on comparative witchcraft have made clear: that while witch fears can take quite…
Read More…enies that he has either a liberal or a conservative agenda. During his in-flight presser on Tuesday afternoon, he said it was a mistake to interpret him as “left-ish”: It is I who follows the church … my doctrine on all this … on economic imperialism, is that of the social doctrine of the church. While that may be true, the reality is that the social doctrine of the Catholic Church is a left-leaning doctrine that emphasizes communitarianism, disd…
Read More…astors. Some, like Rick Warren, Pat Robertson, and Joel Osteen are living fairly high on the hog for men of the cloth. Osteen and his wife, in fact, recently appeared on the cover of Success Magazine—a glossy dedicated entirely to uplifting the world’s successful people. One gander at the magazine itself shows that the word success is decidedly defined as “people who have made a ton of money doing what they do.” The fact that they inspire folks li…
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…ct surprise statements from the pope when he speaks off the cuff, often on airplane press conferences. His 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 co…
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…New York, after more than thirty years at Williams College, where he now chairs Columbia University’s Department of Religion. He is attempting to reorganize the department’s faculty around problems, rather than religious traditions or academic disciplines, in order to create a new, dynamic kind of scholarly community that can be responsive to pressing questions as they arise. RD: A friend of mine saw me reading After God and asked, “So what’s afte…
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…national borders recede, the spiritual self can expand. The confusion, despair, and exultation of life abroad makes the twinkle of the stars seem more mysterious and awe-inspiring at home. Something is out there, and you have to see it to believe it. Luckily, with planet Earth, unlike other sources of spiritual sustenance, you can see it. If these are some of the reasons why “we,” as a species, benefit from travel, then these same motivations coul…
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…a boy—that dunk in the cold baptistery during a gospel revival was more a flight from hell and from my growing sense of sexual difference than a spiritual conviction. After taking the bread and wine that Sunday at Trinity United Methodist Church in Austin’s Hyde Park, I couldn’t get up. I knelt at the altar rail and wept, shaking, still not believing in a God or a community that would accept me just as I am, rather than just how others wanted and…
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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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…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 sat out the…
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