Religion Dispatches
…tion combining Holiness-based Israelite churches, Judaism, conjuring, West Indian festivals, Central European occult practices, and freemasonry. Although Matthew tried his best to hide this religious bricolage, his papers offer a rare opportunity to see how new religions are made. Is there anything you had to leave out? Tons. I came to see Black Israelites as being very closely related to Black Muslims. Not only was there overlap between the group…
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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….
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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…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…
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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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…e of analysis that I find more troubling. McWhorter deems wokeness to be a new religion. Had he simply declared wokeness a new ideology or simply stayed with his third-wave antiracism construct we could have simply debated the merits of his argument. Yet his declaration of wokeness as religion serves not as honest assessment of religious thinking in the form of social justice activism. Instead, religion is invoked as a ready-made punching bag for…
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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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…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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…t critic James Wood’s recent, provocative essay/review of Terry Eagleton’s new book, itself a broadside against the New Atheists, in particular Richard Dawkins. Readers who are scholars of religion were puzzled, too. What exactly are Wood’s own views, and what do they tell us about the way “religion” is regarded by certain public intellectuals? Since we are already riding piggyback here, I will ignore Eagleton’s and Dawkins’ books in order to expo…
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…ent of the obfuscation and blame-shifting when I realized that the bulk of new philanthropy going on in New York in the 1990s—an interventionist philanthropy very much focused on support for the deserving poor—was being initiated by committed Democrats. One fast-rising new charity raised staggering amounts from hip young Democratic money managers at its annual galas. It spelled out its approach in big bold letters for all to see: no, we do NOT fun…
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