Religion Dispatches
…true intention of what our Constitution meant,” she continued. “The homosexuals get it — it’s a struggle between our religious freedoms and their right to do what they want to do.” Ah, there’s the old canard that always gets trotted out by those on the religious right — it’s gays vs. God! Those filthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for…
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…-door neighbors believed this odd little story. As it happens, one of my next-door neighbors is a Marxist atheist, but the neighbors on the other side do attend the hip, youth-oriented Christian church in town. As such, what they believe may bear some family resemblance to Dawkins’ sketch. My guess, however, is that the resemblance is about as close as what the typical political cartoon rendition of President Obama bears to the real man. That is,…
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…paying for my daughter’s college education. Seriously, I wish I could have written Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those magisterial books about history that has become part of history. Books like that happen once in a generation. Sigh. What’s your next book? It is on a less-than cheerful subject—the decline of Christianity in the West. I’m wondering what forms Christianity will take, and what wisdom it will bear, as its hold on its a…
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…y large numbers part with the Vatican over precisely the issues one would expect: feminism and sexual ethics. Birth control and abortion are not only “litmus tests” for US Supreme Court justices; they provide the banners both progressive and anti-Modern Catholics carry into cultural battle today. It is scarcely imaginable how, given the current impasse, North American Catholics will not re-define their relationship to Roman authority in the relati…
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…he new board whether it should apply or ignore the standards. So, if the Texas textbook controversy were to end up having little impact on textbooks either across the country or even in Texas, was it all just a tempest in a teapot? The answer, Hillis says, is no. Unfortunately, young inexperienced teachers in small districts will look to the curriculum standards for guidance. And while teaching creationism is illegal, someone would have to be will…
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…the overarching spirit of the pages is determinedly representative. Same-sex couples and mixed-race couples, old money couples and new money couples, couples who like tennis and couples who like cooking classes—everyone is there. The reader then becomes convinced by this welcoming attitude that you, too, could marry on Block Island; that you, too, could have parents who live in Bermuda; and that you, too could know that seafood display equipment c…
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…amp would agree that there is a need for reform of the federal nonprofit tax code, including fairer enforcement. And I while I can’t respond to everything in Bruce’s volley, I would be remiss not to correct him on my alleged double standard when it comes to public expression. Religion, unlike “deep environmentalism” occupies a distinct, and endlessly controversial place in our history, whereas “deep environment,” whatever its merits, does not. But…
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…War II, American car culture increased elder anxieties about adolescent sexual experimentation. By the 1980s, films like Hardbodies and Porky’s suggested that high school and spring break offered unlimited sexual exploration. By the 1990s, a new generation of parents learned from American Pie that not even dessert was safe from the adolescent libido. Horror films in the “slasher” genre have long played with the connection between fear, eroticism,…
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…n of the young Orthodox bourgeoisie—Jews like himself who he terms “metrodox,” raised with the social expectations of their worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and de…
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…ts like the five elements and yin-yang but lacks a specific spiritual context I expected from the piece. The focus of Ping-chen’s writing is not on spiritual food ritual but on medicinal treatments and food remedies. While it offers a thorough examination of The Book of Congee, I would have appreciated more critical analysis of Chinese food culture as it has descended from Taoism and Buddhism. Regulating Food, Regulating Identity In the end, Conra…
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