Religion Dispatches
…ere a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? The DaVinci Code. Now, that’s a profitable reworking of Christian history. I wouldn’t have to worry about paying for my daughter’s college education. Seriously, I wish I could have written Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those magisterial books about history that has become part of history. Books like that happen once in a generation. Sigh. What’s your next book? It is on…
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…ke just one example, James Dobson’s sprawling conglomerate has its own zip code in Colorado Springs and a larger monthly print circulation than the New York Times) and argue that it will not so easily wither on the vine. The most jaded on the left simply assert that the religious right is the truest expression of the heart of the evangelical community and is thus here to stay. If the argument that “the era of the religious right is over” depended…
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…d on this nonviolent principle. In his view this principle was universally applicable; Germany’s Jews too could apply satyagraha. Gandhi’s claim that “the force of truth” is a universally applicable technique rests on this analysis: there is an element of truth in each side of a dispute. Conflict can be resolved through a process in which each side can see the kernel of truth in the other side’s position. Missing from Gandhi’s analysis: a scenario…
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…employ of Obama, in the employ of McCain, in the employ of Oprah, and I’m apparently not going to be alive on Election Day.” Mansfield apparently got McClellanized by his fellow Christians: “if I as a public Christian and former pastor can be treated like this by Christians, then I suppose people like Al Franken and Hillary Clinton must get even worse from church folks. So, why would they ever think of embracing the God of people filled with such…
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…dy for some serious War on Culture…er…culture war. So there’s Christian as code-word for ‘evangelical.’ Like when Republican politicians say it. And there’s Christian meaning Protestant, as opposed to Catholic. And there’s Christian the way a missionary might mean it, (as opposed to heathen?). And there are those “anonymous Christians,” or involuntary Christians…was that Rahner who devised that category? Does anyone outside of seminary or grad sch…
Read More…blical womanhood” blog Ladies Against Feminism, agreed: “Isaiah 3:12 truly applies… I can assent to Sarah Palin’s conservative views and even applaud them, but I mourn for a nation whose men have forgotten how to lead their families and their land in the way our Founders envisioned and the way God intended. A wife and mother has already been elected by God to the highest office in the land. She has her own particular husband to help, his calling t…
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…ople will be persuaded by the repetition. Most of us know that persuasion happens in other, more private ways. It happens, for example, when someone close to you—a child, a sibling, a parent—declares themselves to you, ‘comes out’ to you, often in a moment marked by anguish and anxiety. “Here is a secret about how I love. Will you still love me after hearing it?” Or persuasion comes about when a respected church leader—a pastor, a teacher, a music…
Read More…h better than the varnished surface which blinks in the sunlight of public approval.” That’s not to say Peg was a sweetie underneath. He was an angry man through and through, born into hatred of Hearst inherited from his father, responsible for the “Hearst Style,” a populist tongue of blood and cliché, expressive of the sentiments of working people but emptied of any real political content, and forever ashamed of that invention; he’d damn it in it…
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…answer everything. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are not actively promoting the use of “supplemental materials” like pro-intelligent design textbooks such as Pandas and People, used in Dover, and its follow-up, The Design of Life. Evangelicals may not realize it, but such an approach is a risky strategy. It’s not just bad science, it’s bad theology. Such dichotomy forces students to choose between faith and science. After Dover’s trial wa…
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…ross the United States is the great variety of manners in which religions happen in and through their rituals and practices, through their symbolic and communal exchanges, and, yes, in light of and sometimes in spite of their in-the-head beliefs. Two of the more usefully analytic definitions of religion that I offer my students, which is not to say they are the “right” ones, come from Catherine Albanese, Professor of American Religious History at…
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