Religion Dispatches
…lobally between 1981 and 2011. So how many of these attackers were, in the classic sense, suicidal? Of course it would we be impossible to investigate all them, and Lankford quite reasonably confines his study to the United States for reasons of statistical accuracy. But he never presents any examples of suicide terrorism that don’t fit is model, and I don’t think it’s because they don’t exist. A more disinterested scholar would not be reluctant t…
Read More…at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and attempted to locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a magical ritual that combined Islamic elements with shamanic practices. On Thursday Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as Rajah Bomoh Sedunia Nujum, delivered a press conference (in which he demonstrated a squint that bore an uncanny resemblance to Pat Robertson.) He initially stated that he had been invited to perform his ritual by one of Malaysia’s “…
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…“card-carrying Christians” took the image as their own defense of a middle-class American way of life against its atheist competitors. The 1960s’ battles over Jesus’ race and class that came from the freedom struggle, liberation theology, and countercurrents against both replayed many of these same image battles. In the era of rising income inequality, the Tea Party, and Occupy, there is no reason to think that contending groups on the political s…
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…000, it became part of an umbrella company called Alticor Inc., which does business as Quixtar in the United States and Canada and as Amway Corp. throughout the rest of the world. Whatever name it goes by, Amway is in the process of launching a major comeback in the United States. A Scam by Any Other Name Over the last four decades of the 20th century, Amway became a phenomenally successful company, and is now the second-largest direct sales compa…
Read More…“Hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jewish men delayed takeoff of a transatlantic flight by refusing to sit next to women, and then caused chaos once it was airborne [by standing in the aisles for the entire flight and refusing to occupy their seats].” Obviously a congested plane aisle isn’t the end of the world (although one can imagine it might be a safety issue in some situations), and the news reports have treated it as a kind of amusing oddity. But…
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…ion? Avishai has long advocated the formation of an ideologically-centrist business class that could be Israel’s emissaries and players in the game of globalization. The Hebrew Republic places its hopes in this globalized class of centrists, and frankly, it’s a good spot to put them in. This political stratum is not confined to Israeli Jews, but includes Palestinian entrepreneurs as well. By its very nature, this economic community stands in oppos…
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…urches ordain women—and these are the churches that are in decline. My own United Church of Christ, the oldest church in the United States, which ordained the first woman minister in the mid-nineteenth century, now has fewer than a million members. Today the Mormons outnumber the church of the Pilgrims seven to one—and the Mormons are not ordaining any women. The church is the last institution in America where it is still legal to discriminate on…
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…it fair to say that these Gilded Age churches had “sold out” to the upper class? That was certainly what many working people argued. There is no question that, as industrial warfare broke out across the late-19th-century United States, the Protestant elite sided almost exclusively with capital. Of course, even that way of putting it makes it sound like the two could be differentiated, when in many cases they could not. In the book I discuss how C…
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….’” A friend who had a studio asked if she would want to teach a trap yoga class. Rogers agreed, and the 60-person class she signed up to teach sold out in just a few hours. And it kept selling out over and over. At the first class, she was overwhelmed. “I had never seen so many plus-sized people, so many queer folks, so many men in baggy pants and fitted caps. That chemical smell when you open a brand new yoga mat for the first time? That was eve…
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…tutional aspects. LH: How have you handled it? MH: I don’t teach Bible classes, so the closest I come to the example you posed is in my class on conflicts between the religious right and left since World War II. Since many of these conflicts involve the Bible, I give students a set of Bible passages—a sort of “greatest hits” package—and ask them to write down what these passages say about (1) relations between women and men, (2) slavery, and (…
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