Religion Dispatches
…hat day and played tennis at 6:45 p.m.” Granted, Carson could have had his dates confused. He wrote the book (with a ghostwriter) in 1990, more than 20 years after the events in question. And he may have confused an offer from the general to recommend him for West Point with a “scholarship.” Maybe. By that time, though, he had gone through college and medical school. He was probably familiar with what being offered a “full scholarship” would look…
Read More
…es should not distract us from moral wisdom that is so contemporaneously relevant that it might well have been written yesterday. *Correction: dates originally read “2050” to 1050. RD regrets the error….
Read More
…n, in the Sukkah of one of our alumni where we would serve the traditional dates eaten at Iftar to break the daily fast. But the event was canceled at the last minute, and the gift of the endowed chair was ultimately refused by the University. The ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) had alerted one of Temple’s Board members that IIIT was an organization with “terrorist” associations and our president was intimidated into refusing the gift. A bit…
Read More
…ification for dismantling federal safety net programs. Subsidiarity, which dates back to the first Vatican Council, says that social problems should be dealt with at the most localized level consistent with their solution, not just devolved for the sake of being devolved. For instance, local food banks found themselves completely overwhelmed during the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession; many reported turning people away. It was the…
Read More
…the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew text that dates from late antiquity or the early middle ages, but includes much earlier material.* The first thing to notice about the way the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan retells the story begins with Cain’s conception: here he is not the son of Adam and Eve, but the result of a union between Eve and the fallen angel Sammael. From the beginning, then, Cain is half-demonic, which goes a lo…
Read More
…canonical texts and rituals.” This requires students to not just memorize dates and doctrines, but come to understand how a person’s faith determines much about their self-identity and relationship with others. And that is accomplished through experiential and immersive personal interaction. The Institute explores lived religion in much the same way the teachers might do it in their classrooms: by inviting people into the classroom to speak about…
Read More…for candidates. A simple shift of frame allows ideologically extreme candidates to hide in public sight, appearing to be something different than they are and much more acceptable than they otherwise would be. The authors report being “troubled” by the extent to which “rights talk” can shift public perceptions of issues and candidates, especially as these allow ideologically extreme figures to pass beneath a “cloak of invisibility.” To me, this i…
Read More
…rew. Why Aramaic? Christological Aramaic is an old theological project. It dates at least as far back as Johann Albrecht von Widmanstadt’s 1555 translation of the Syriac New Testament into Latin, which he presented as the original language of Jesus. That tradition claims that Aramaic (not Hebrew or Greek) is the key not merely to Jesus’ cultural background, but to hisipsissima verba, his very words, and thus an unmediated experience of him. This i…
Read More
…and Michelle “encourage their kids to take a chaperone along on all their dates so they have someone to keep them accountable and ensure that they stick to their courtship standards.” In their family, they police sex outside of marriage. In politics they police sex between consenting adults, sex between people of the same sex; they are “pure” and “godly” because they police and condemn other people’s sexual lives. But now the public knows that th…
Read More…piscopal, Third Presbyterian Church, and Shady Grove Methodist Church. (No dates or locations are given.) Brat’s interview with The National Review supports this picture of theological eclecticism, inasmuch as he cites John Calvin, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr as influences. Lastly, we have his own words during the campaign, in which he bemoans the dearth of philosophical and theological celebrities. Via Mother Jones: Who is [sic] our great mo…
Read More