Religion Dispatches
…y now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want to bring back Niebuhr are conservatives. (I’m an admitted fanboy, but that’s about coming from the same church background as Niebuhr as much as anything.) And that doesn’t even get to the worst of it. Douthat misunderstands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic…
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…issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have cell phones and be on the Internet? If they forbid them, that’s going to be very tough, and if they permit them, they’re going to introduce a huge new force into the world of child rearing and education. Religious education is going to have to make some drastic shifts. And it’ll be interesting to see how it works. This is still hinged on belief. This next generation can be Musli…
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…ional or decadent. That said, Neiwert slams those who misuse the term for “cheap political theater,” writing that “inappropriate comparisons tend to obscure the reality of what’s taking place.” So what is the reality? Neiwert recently spoke with Religion Dispatches about violent rhetoric, imprecatory prayer, and eliminationism. Religion Dispatches: You begin the book talking primarily about the excesses of media personalities like Rush Limbaugh,…
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…ager for attention. The puppy piddled in the corner more than once, taking cheap shots at political adversaries (including McCain campaign apparatchiks) and using the annoying, sophomoric reference to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” Party. But Going Rogue was not unpleasant. The second book in the Sarah Palin œuvre, however, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, crosses the line from cute puppy bouncing on his back legs…
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…Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the public to think more critically about what “religion” is. They are dire…
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…tepping up the pace of deportations of those same persons. Why? Because of cheap politics and the sneer. And also because people of faith have started fighting among themselves instead of working to resolve the problems. We should be in charge of helping politicians have the political cover they need to do the extravagantly right and realistic thing. Consensus is possible if people are willing to give and take; to be a little less convinced that t…
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…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…
Read More…e?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…
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…craft engaging narratives. In sum, those of us sitting comfortably in our cheap desk chairs in our sterile offices in the nation’s colleges and universities have no higher ground to stand on. While we all labor to maintain an appropriate level of nuance, complexity, and context in our work, there is no doubt that we could write bigger books and assign our students more reading to gain deeper contextualization and fit more people and more themes a…
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…ed that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts. Between the cheap jokes and bourgeois self-loathing are murmurs worth hearing, if only as microfiction. Likewise, the app’s agnosticism facilitates a lucid tableau of spontaneous popular theology. Of the 24 confessions, only one references God as an active third party, two command the Sinner to forgive themselves, and three confessors speak in the first person as God. “God forgive me,”…
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