Religion Dispatches
…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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…nmental Protection Agency’s informing us last week that man-made carbon dioxide—a gas that humans exhale and plants need to live, a gas that represents less than 0.1 percent of the atmosphere—is a dangerous pollutant threatening to overheat the world. (While the newsroom at the Philadelphia Inquirer has been gutted, Santorum gets paid $1,750 per column to foist such misinformation on a poorly informed public.) In all fairness, Santorum makes one g…
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…-century England, toward the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. An examination—admittedly not systematic enough—regarding the relationship between these ideas and the emergence of Zionism suggests only a very marginal and indirect influence.’’ Other scholars, myself among them, have found a more direct and powerful connection between Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism. As historian of ideas Richard Popkin noted in the early 1990s, ‘‘Much…
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…sh Community Center, twenty people gather around a table to study Jewish texts. The texts are out of the classical canon: the Bible, of course, but also the third-century Mishnah and its sixth-century commentary, the Babylonian Talmud, and the medieval jurist Maimonides. As people introduce themselves, it becomes clear pretty soon that most of the people in this room have not had positive Jewish educational experiences. Though some of the members…
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