Religion Dispatches
…f-reported Jedi claimed the religion for their own amusement, or to poke fun at the government.” * * * Pre-order your copy of Gary Laderman’s new book Sacred Matters (The New Press, May, 2009), here….
Read More…were fully intact, would we even have Trump running things right now? The new ad is clearly intended to shut down any actual reflection on this point and to associate voting for Biden with making your worries go away. Replace a scary old white man with a (more) benign one. What could be simpler? 2. Treating Trump and Trumpism under the “aberration” category is dangerously misleading (also something else that many of us know in our bones). Trump’s…
Read More
…nation, it is impossible to know whether opening communion would encourage newcomers or turn away existing members, but it is certainly an issue worth following. The End is Where? It goes almost without saying that mainline Protestantism is in an extended period of at least numerical, if not spiritual, decline, and many commentators have taken the occasion of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church—still an important symbol of normative Ame…
Read More
…of The Bible to be called ‘The Princess Diana Bible’. Revision Studios in New Mexico, USA will fund the new translation of the Bible, in which God says it is better to be gay than straight. Mitchell also hopes to adapt the book for a two-part mini-series, ‘The Gay Old Testament’ and ‘The Gay New Testament’. “There are many different versions of the Bible, I don’t see why we can’t have one,” said Mitchell. Aside from a little problem figuring out…
Read More
…were on the defensive. The public blamed them for the Great Crash and the New Deal had constructed a new regulatory state and empowered labor unions, two developments that corporate America readily resented. Business leaders quickly resolved to win back the public and devoted millions of dollars to a massive campaign of public relations, redirecting traditional business lobbies like the National Association of Manufacturers to the cause and creat…
Read More
…able remained a feature of family life. Meanwhile, religious leaders found new ways to reach people in their homes. In the nineteenth century, missionaries traveled from house to house, delivering religious texts and newspapers to support reading and prayer. In the twentieth century, Charles Fuller and Billy Graham pioneered radio and television. Children’s programming from Davey and Goliath to VeggieTales has offered Christian alternatives to mor…
Read More…visiting two of their synagogues I am convinced that this is a completely new religion without any connection to Judaism. Total assimilation. Their prayer is like a completely Protestant ceremony. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, past president of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote before the election that Rivlin had refused to address him as rabbi, and called on Rivlin to address the idol worship comments. In the Jerusalem Post, a Rivlin defender came rather…
Read More
…turn. As the Pew Research Center’s write-up on the religious makeup of the new Congress puts it, “the U.S. Congress remains largely untouched by two trends that have long marked religious life in the United States: a decades-long decline in the share of Americans who identify as Christian, and a corresponding increase in the percentage who say they have no religious affiliation.” Specifically, the new Congress’s membership is over 87% Christian, w…
Read More
…h any kind of life in your soul requires hearing the cries for relief in a new and different way. Then too, these movements—for gun control, or for racial or sexual justice—speak in a fundamentally new way. Ordinary people are standing up and speaking for themselves, not relying on surrogates or political parties to work on their behalf. The Parkland kids have been called pawns in an attack on Second Amendment rights, but they’re not liberals. The…
Read More
…to take root in Palestine. But that same social context also gave rise to new Arab newspapers such as El Carmel and El Palestine, around which coalesced a collective Palestinian identity. These papers openly challenged the Zionist project (not the “Jews”) and warned the Arabic-reading public of an ensuing confrontation. As Rashid Khalidi argues in his book Palestinian Identity (2009) Loeterman suggest that Zionist and Palestinian identity emerge…
Read More