Religion Dispatches
…isty skit (a hijabi confessing she likes to curse “a lot”), but no working-class, no poor people, no African Americans, and in the end, everything would be molded to “fit” a white middle class A-plus student stereotype. So next time the audience is half my age, I’ll think twice about giving them my last free evening. It’s good we are standing up for ourselves. I guess poor and working-class young Muslim women will eventually make their stand or th…
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…must admit that a significant proportion of voters, including many working-class voters, switched from voting Democratic in 2020 to voting Republican this year. This has been widely acknowledged, of course, but reducing this fact to a rightward shift in the working class runs the risk of yet again drawing the wrong lessons from an election. A large slice of American voters are notoriously low-information for a variety of reasons: economic pressure…
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When I first heard the tragic news of the shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, I was preparing a lecture for my Introduction to Western Religions course on Jesus in the Qur’an. This lecture asks a deceptively simple question: How was Islam different from Christianity in the 7th century? As a historian of religion, I like to use questions like this to challenge my students to interrogate the definitions of religion that we use and ho…
Read More…whatever religious views she wants, but when she shares those views to her classroom in her capacity as a public school teacher her speech becomes government speech. Her views about what makes a “real” Christian are a confessional position and when she used her position as a government employee to impose those views on others, it undermined the establishment clause. That’s the real issue. The fact that she also offended students and parents is imp…
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…d, they are demographically much like the rest of White Americans, working class and middle class with a significant stratum of middle class professionals—professors, lawyers, chiropractors, etc.—as their leaders. And, these are not a string of disconnected organizations sharing only a common set of hatreds. Rather, this is a single movement, with a common set of leaders and interlocking memberships that hold a complete and sometimes sophisticated…
Read More…of Born-Again America, told me, a common narrative at the intersection of business and evangelicalism as that the state is the “enemy” of “godly forms of consumerism: the local business or large-scale ‘Christian’ corporation.” The Greens, though, believe the Bible should influence more than just business: Beyond their stores, and beyond the elder [David] Green’s unmatched generosity to evangelical causes, Steve Green, Hobby Lobby’s president, has…
Read More…y not simply check his faith at the workplace door. Accordingly, Christian business owners, as a matter of scriptural requirement, are obligated to conduct their business as an expression of their faith and in accordance with the dictates of faith and conscience. “This case throws into sharp relief the problems that can arise when the Christian doctrine of work is not properly understood,” Hugh Whelchel, the executive director of the Institute for…
Read More…shape our working lives, but it seems like you’re confusing ministry with business, and business with ministry. When you officiate a wedding you’re not acting as an individual, are you? Don’t you represent the church you serve? Do you have a lot of gay and lesbian couples who know your position on these issues still asking you to marry them? That seems kind of unlikely. And about that cake-maker. You seem to be suggesting that every time a busine…
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…ustice and fair play at all levels of human interaction.” Much more than a business model for specialty banks, he and many others believe that Islamic economics offers a much wider vision. The conventional view of the homo economicus—super-rational, selfish utility maximizer—dehumanizes people, denying the divine stamp on our nature. A truly Islamic economic theory, they believe, should restructure consumer preferences, ensuring that basic necessi…
Read More…izable donation from the Charles Koch Foundation, because, the head of the business school tells Gibson, the foundation “felt the new business school’s mission to promote a ‘person-centered economy’ dovetailed with its own goals of fostering ‘principle entrepreneurship.’” That’s person-centered, not people-centered. In reaction to the $1 million grant, 50 priests, activists, theologians, and scholars wrote a letter of protest, charging, “We are c…
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