Religion Dispatches
…ople would also read. I have been inspired by the marvelous writers of the New Yorker, and so I tried to write the book with some of the literary qualities of the best non-fiction I read in that magazine (as I was also filling my head with academic writing). In sum, I thought of my audience as a New Yorker audience—educated, but not necessarily academics or specialists. You have a pretty strong critique of Melville Herskovits and his pathbreaking…
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…de (aka “Dudeism”), a religion based on the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski and Oprah Winfrey is arguably the most important national spiritual leader. That is why the Grateful Dead is not just a band, but also a new American religious community. And “Truckin’” is not just a song, but also sacred text extolling the value and virtue of a new American pilgrimage, a journey that is at once physical, spiritual, and musical….
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…t think they’re ready. I’d rather work with folks who are ready.” But this new administration has changed everything for George and evangelicals of color across the nation. The fact that 81 percent of white evangelicals supported a candidate who channeled white nationalism is not lost on minority believers. Nor is the unending news of travel bans, appointments of white nationalists, mass deportations and racial hate crimes. It has forced a reckoni…
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…ly “welcomed” us. I hope that no gay or lesbian person makes the mistake of believing that Haggard has changed and is really “welcoming” them to his new church. Meet the new charlatan, just the same as the old charlatan….
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…moments of challenge and crisis—in those darkest of hours—the dawning of a new age is only made possible by those who would dare to imagine a new world. Not those who rest on a blessed assurance. Not those who assume that everything will be taken care of in the end. No. King understood that any new age obliges us to work. As he said in 1957, I have talked about the new age which is fastly coming into being. I have talked about the fact that God is…
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…in the national Civil Rights Movement. But we are standing at a genuinely new moment. On the downhill slope of the rise and decline of the mainline and the swell and ebb of the religious right, we have before us a genuinely new task. Facing the reality that neither the religious left nor the religious right accounts for more than 20% of the country, we must embrace the passing of the time—if it ever existed—where one segment of our amazingly dive…
Read More…ion claims that it promotes “Constitutionalist Judicial Nominees,” told OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, that the “Ten Commandments would be removed all over the place. ‘Under God’ would be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. The death penalty would be banned. There’d probably be constitutional rights to all sorts of new things like human cloning and physician-assisted suicide. Racial preferen…
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…e development of new and more complex intellectual and spiritual horizons, new forms of shared awareness. The Pope’s new embrace of digital space as a site for the meaningful expansion and enrichment of social, intellectual, and spiritual relatedness in which the faithful should engage is welcome. But, as Ritchie pointed out in his blog, the Pope’s letter errs in assuming that digital media are the particular provenance of the young. While it’s tr…
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…eir home churches and satellite churches around the country and the world. New Apostolic Reformation The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), on the other hand, has been able to operate somewhat out of the general public’s purview, save for the work of writers at Talk To Action, who have chronicled the changes and escalations in the movement. The NAR roots are also firmly within the boundaries of the historic Pentecostal movement. Foundational to NAR…
Read More…In leaving, there are social consequences and challenges in navigating the new world—a new meaning system—one that’s quite different from the religious one. Research shows that individuals who leave Christian fundamentalism experience a situational crisis in leaving the religion—a unique meaning-making framework focused on the sacred and divine—and undergo a meaning-making process to achieve a positive resolution in leaving the religion. The meani…
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