Religion Dispatches
…own universe of (often all-white) Christian academies and charities, they divest from the idea of being part of a common national enterprise. Challenging this sentiment in the name of faith are Roman Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians. “I understand that there’s a strong anti-tax sentiment out there,” says Rev. Reed of the NC Council of Churches, which works not with individual congregations but presbyteries and dioceses. But…
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…a beacon of religious liberty and expression? Providing due time to both individual and social struggles for personal freedom of conscience, we meet the controversial Anne Hutchinson, who consumes a good chunk of the first hour; Frederick Douglass, who fulminates against the slaveholders’ religion during hour three; Charles Augustus Briggs, who sacrifices a comfortable academic career to endorse scientific findings in the fourth hour; civil rights…
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…a long leash and many short ties to a worldwide community of which each individual house is a unique part. Abbott Weakland knew his way around the Vatican under Pope Paul VI, when he had friends in high places and a good rapport with the pontiff. That all changed under Pope John Paul II, and the rest, as they say, is history. Weakland eventually became persona non grata in the very places where he had been heavily involved, especially in liturgic…
Read More…aining) if the urge grabs you suddenly in the middle of teaching a physics class. The urge is almost biological, and the inability to express rapture, ecstasy, joy, desperation or humility is also almost biological, like a choking of the windpipe. Diversity policy, laws about minority religion, even pluralism, in their current state, do not cover the voluntary choking of such urges. We taught ourselves to perform complete productivity after our pr…
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…ntury and sought to provide protection for Jews who were treated as second-class citizens in both Christian Europe and Muslim countries for many hundreds of years. The desire for a safe haven made perfect sense, though the antagonism that they encountered from many Palestinians made perfect sense as well given the previous history of Western colonialism and Christian crusades. Palestinians saw the Jews as an invading force that would uproot their…
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…efore he arrived. He read C.S. Lewis’ apologetic works and Susan Harding’s classic study of the Lynchburg scene, The Book of Jerry Falwell. A Christian friend tutored him in some of the jargon. He decided to go undercover; to his new friends at Liberty, Roose said he had recently accepted Jesus as his personal savior. Nobody there guessed that he was not really among the elect. His family of liberal, secular Quakers serve as the Jiminy Cricket on…
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…ee Brent Plate’s “Why Bill Maher Gets a ‘C’ in My Introduction to Religion Class”]. When I was watching Religulous in an Upper West Side theater in New York, it seemed to me that the laughter and shouted comments were just another version of “Amen!” and “Preach it brother!” I assumed these cries of affirmation were from the more spirit-filled atheists in the audience! In a moment of unintended self-parody, Maher even delivered an altar call at the…
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…to entrepreneurship, which lionized the visionary leadership provided by individuals exercising their God-given autonomy. The focus on the individual as entrepreneur echoed religious themes that valorized individuality; particularly the importance of each person’s unique access to God and responsibility for his own salvation. Not surprisingly, alongside the teaching of (Christian) service and free enterprise, college business programs also taught…
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…ies, Chmielewski sought the opinion of a certified professional midwife (a class of midwife distinct from certified nurse midwives, who have extensive medical training) from Central Indiana Home Birth Midwives. According to retired OB-GYN blogger Amy Tuteur, the midwife told Chmielewski that she was carrying twins, and maintained her diagnosis despite an ultrasound that only revealed one fetus, claiming that one twin was “hiding” behind the other….
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…arch of History. No longer merely serving the ambitions of an aristocratic class, wars were now “engines” of history, crucial junctures at which nations, peoples, and classes revealed their true nature and purpose, fulfilling their historical destiny. Clearly, the technoscientific side of Hegel’s impression is only part of the story. The Weltgeist was, quite explicitly, a concept through which Hegel sought to synthesize Christian metaphysics with…
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