Religion Dispatches
…y clear, even if it sounded a bit unconvincing—that despite his support as governor for civil unions, he’s 100% against marriage equality. He’ll need to show he’s capable of surviving the early primaries in order to make it to states more friendly to moderate candidates. But it will take more than a bit of charisma to defeat the Romney machine….
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…ess, magical art, and maybe even a little decadence.” Bowie was paradoxically completely liminal and somehow also at the center of things. His music and many personas were proof of Rimbaud’s assertion that “I is an Other,” or Bob Dylan’s claim that “I wake up and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain that I’m someone else.” If the self is a tapestry of influences, a bit from here and a bit from there, ever changing, mutable, me…
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…ded. But, like those others, traditional religious institutions will probably only be able to go so far in joining the bandwagon of a movement that is self-consciously non-hierarchical, revolutionary, and disruptive. Unless they succeed in co-opting it. Nathan brings up the trappings of ordinary religion, the rituals, ceremonies, and structure that he argues are now needed in the Occupy movement. I was interested that he brings up the idea of reli…
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…e was not designed for thinking about probably most of science, and certainly really big phenomena like global warming. Beyond just sort of encouraging big-picture thinking, I don’t know. I really struggled in the last chapter—I was trying not to make policy recommendations that are too specific. Just like we’ve got the IAEA to monitor nuclear weapons, we should set up a similar entity to monitor biological weapons. Or some sort of catastrophic ri…
Read More…tionists themselves hold a view of knowledge that says that there are really only two possible worldviews (a biblical one and a humanist one that comes in several varieties) and that both worldview are in a conflict for dominion (so in their view “we” are fighting for it too). Its not that Rushdoony’s views of the biblical punishment for homosexuality have become widely accepted. The real influence is much more subtle: it’s in the now-multiple g…
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…process I helped to initiate at the church I attend. Gatherings don’t simply supply pastoral support for the unemployed and underemployed; nor are they simply resume-writing “reinvention” groups; nor is the process mainly about vocational discernment or organizing for change. Although participants can and do get all of these things, the group’s most valuable gift is the direct connection to others who also experience humiliating rejection, acute…
Read More…the central Piazza, this curiously Protestant concern with images seems a bit, well, a bit out of place. The thing is, in Rome, Jesus isn’t in Christmas, at least not until the morning of the 25th. Manger scenes in Rome don’t have a Baby Jesus; the cradle is left empty until Christmas morning. So there’s no question of getting Jesus out, much less taking him out, of Christmas. He’s not here yet. There is a lot of theology packed into that not-so-…
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…ision show, or conversation. These generalized styles of thinking can equally apply to religious belief or nonbelief. Religious believers and nonbelievers alike fall into fast and frugal “rules of thumb” about the world, and both engage in analytic thought about texts, ideas, relationships, and objects. To see past Grewal’s artificial division between “intuition/religion” and “analysis/nonbelief” we need only look to Christian theology, which invo…
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…cience, or the “Inner Light” as Quakers called it, that was the ultimate arbiter of God’s voice. Officially known as “The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” the Shakers have never had membership numbers on their side. At their height there were dozens of communities throughout New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest. Despite always being relatively small (as the rigors of their religious vocation, not to mention the i…
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…1908. Yet by the time she died, the LDS Church had abandoned the (relatively) racially inclusive policies and theologies of its earliest years. Instead, the church practiced and began to formalize the racist theologies and practices for which it would become infamous during the twentieth century. Initially, I wanted to write a book exploring why James stayed in a church that initially embraced her but, by the time she died, made it clear to her t…
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