Religion Dispatches
…ture? The answer seems relatively clear. The Church is growing in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, and is even making significant inroads in the Far East. And what these emerging Catholic populations want is a culturally conservative theology (recall the uproar in these same regions when the openly gay Anglican bishop, Gene Robinson, was confirmed). The code word for most of that uproar is “anti-Modern.” So the irony of Catholic anti-Modernis…
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…, which was accomplished at the federal level without much controversy, America did not practice separation in the sense usually meant today. Since America’s public square always contained references to God and other religious images, it can be said with confidence that at least most leading figures did not see the Establishment Clause as forbidding something like the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance or prayers at government-sponsored…
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…is parish spent too much time in “company keeping.” After World War II, American car culture increased elder anxieties about adolescent sexual experimentation. By the 1980s, films like Hardbodies and Porky’s suggested that high school and spring break offered unlimited sexual exploration. By the 1990s, a new generation of parents learned from American Pie that not even dessert was safe from the adolescent libido. Horror films in the “slasher” genr…
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…ly fascinating, and perhaps admirable, that we have come to a moment in American religious life when an Orthodox Jew can say such a thing, it also betrays a stunning naiveté. The evangelists Cohen seems to enjoy so much, though they might fetishize a Jew, presumably would not reciprocate; Jesus, after all, being the only way to the father. And he has strangely fond words for John Hagee, joining the ranks of shortsighted Jews who refuse to see the…
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…Plants? As Brunk and Coward are careful to point out, no religion or moral code is monolithic. Expert scholars may hold different views than lay practitioners of a particular faith. Throughout the book, lay adherents and expert interpreters alike offer perspectives on how GM foods intersect with their religious and ethical dietary traditions. Each author conducted additional focus groups among their respective discipline or tradition. In Lyne Lét…
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…informed public.) In all fairness, Santorum makes one good point: many Americans don’t like being told what to believe. The latest Harris poll released last week reveals that despite efforts in the past year to educate the public about evolution, Americans have not changed their views much since Harris’ 2007 poll. Forty-five percent of respondents indicated that they believe in evolution, 33 percent indicated that they don’t believe in it, and 22…
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…d by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people, it was most of America.’’ In 1948 President Truman, in keeping with American public opinion, granted Israel diplomatic recognition despite the protestations of many senior officials in the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State George Marshall among them. Though historians are divided on the reasons for Truman’s decision, they are agreed that among the deciding factors was Truman’s sincer…
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…orker justice issues) used Yiddish as an organizing language but spoke “American.” The conceptual vocabulary of the union movement and the socialist movement was embraced by the Jewish participants in those movements; and continued to be used when those Jews started their own organizations, such as the American Jewish Congress. During the seventies (which was, for all intents and purposes, when the sixties hit the Jewish community) and eighties, t…
Read More…it in Shorto’s account of the Texas battle. The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however—perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists—some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history th…
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…a flashpoint in the so-called Charismatic Renewal, an outbreak of neo-Pentecostalism that erupted, incongruously, in American Catholicism in 1967 and spread like holy fire through the mainline Protestant denominations. The FBC’s charismatic orientation encouraged public displays of beatified passion and, more generally, a middle-class, white (read: toned-down) version of the exuberant call-and-response dynamic that has animated black Pentecostal c…
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