Religion Dispatches
…y well. So Disney’s take on life in New Orleans and the bayou is at best a cheap commercial ploy, and at worst, a revisionist religious and racist nightmare. Yes, I know, it’s just fantasy, right? But your kids are going to be in my classroom later, and I am going to have to deconstruct this mess. Note: spoilers ahead. If you want to see the mess, stop here. The New Orleans and the Louisiana Bayou that Disney’s writers have concocted for viewer pl…
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…her book is published that way except encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone books. You don’t want to read those books, you go to them for authoritative answers and you don’t argue with the dictionary. If you’re playing Scrabble you go to the dictionary to settle the argument. We’ve encouraged people to think about the Bible as this kind of book, a source of authority, the final word, not to be debated. I think that helps people to think that…
Read More…o doesn’t love skinks? 6. Willpower! Is magical! 7. Find an accountability partner! Every time you are tempted to sexually harass a stranger, call your partner and make a confession. 8. Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it every time you think about harassing a woman! Rubber bands are cheap – mere cents. Why, you could snap yourself with a rubber band more-or-less constantly for the next year, for a fraction of what any of those fancyp…
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…an’t quite pinpoint what all of these had in common, except that they were cheap, over-simplified, and kitschy. And thanks to Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, the Frankfurt School, and a legion of writers and musicians allergic to the cliché, I came to reject kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that some people, perhaps most people,…
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…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…
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…ng on your perspective and imagination: a tale of American colonization, a cheap rip-off of Pocahantas or Russian science fiction, an allegory for the Chinese industrialization process. Writing in the New York Times last week, Dave Itzkoff outlined the many ways in which James Cameron’s Avatar has been praised and/or condemned, the ways viewers have interpreted the movie as an allegory for this or that, the way it might even serve as a “Rorschach…
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…story of right-wing defeat and liberalism ascendant doesn’t unravel like a cheap suit on a blue dog Dem voting more money for the war. “Fundamentalism” is bigger than Ted Haggard, bigger than Jerry Falwell, bigger than the president, who, if defectors from his regime are to be believed, has lost all but a sliver of his religion. It’s bigger and older and more enduring than the political coalition currently called the “Christian Right,” soon to be…
Read More…ose reading of Scripture is cramped, at best. Seen in this context, it’s a cheap dodge for liberals within the UMC to blame churches and delegates from the Global South for the vote to retain (and even heighten) the denomination’s ban on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the Un…
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…ngelicals, including Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore, the cheap grace to distance themselves from their Christian nationalist coreligionists without interrogating the authoritarian aspects of their own theology, you inevitably fail to fully account for the causes of January 6. Those causes very much include common and inherently authoritarian evangelical beliefs like the theology of male “headship” and female submission, of which…
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…ny analyst and former official with a view on Tibet and China could fire a cheap shot. The Indian government’s assertiveness vis-à-vis China is refreshing (though achieving it at the expense of refugees and Buddhist monks who fled China at 14 to get an education smacks of bad taste.) The affair has also unsettled the sentiments of those living in India’s predominantly Buddhist Himalayan region, which separates China from India. There were large pr…
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