Religion Dispatches
…thor Albert Hernàndez, has just published a book, The Quest For the Historical Satan, that takes this question by the tail. I spoke recently with De La Torre about the disastrous legacy the idea of Satan has bequeathed to Christianity, the dark side of God, and about the persistence of that Obama-as-Antichrist campaign. What’s the general idea behind this new book? God’s portrayal as a character of absolute goodness is the result of a theology tha…
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…er Wind.” The Collège de Sociologie, a mid-century experiment in philosophical activism headed by Caillois and Georges Bataille, may have been Occupy Wall Street’s philosophical school, come too early: “A winter, perhaps a Quaternary—a glacier’s advance—is beginning for this broken-down, halfway collapsing, senile society: a spirit of examination.” In this lecture Caillois asserts that rapid changes in the notion of “the individual” (perhaps like…
Read More…lenge anyway and may even have been mostly symbolic. And now the most conservative state has decisively rejected a personhood initiative by a surprisingly wide margin. The Hill’s Sam Baker is ready to call this a “major setback” for the personhood. Time will tell whether anti-abortion strategists agree with him, but at this point one really has to wonder why they would not….
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…hey will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” In announcing the Secular Coalition for America’s presidential scorecard, the group’s president, Herb Silverman, said, “it’s frightening to see that at least half of the candidates don’t have a basic understanding of the principle of separation of church and state on which our country was foun…
Read MoreThe Hill reports that Republican Congressman Phil Gingrey of Georgia walked out of the president’s speech to the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday. Said his spokesperson: “He was disturbed and offended by the president’s use of prayer and reflection time for partisan politics and class warfare,” [Jen] Talaber said. “Rep. Gingrey enjoyed listening to the keynote speaker and found the breakfast to be inspiring until President Obama began politick…
Read More…t Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents both a Catholic and evangelical college in a lawsuit against HHS, headlined its press release on the day the Obama administration announced it would not carve out a broader exemption for religious institutions: “Obama Administration Refuses to Change Abortion-Drug Mandate.” In announcing its lawsuit on behalf of Colorado Christian University, Becket stated, “The Health and Human Services regulation ma…
Read More…final package that contained no provision for abortion coverage but was falsely depicted as covering abortion by the Bishops. Obama’s greatest sin, in this view: violating the religious beliefs of the Catholic hierarchy. Not the beliefs or practices of lay Catholics, or the Catholic and non-Catholic employees of Catholic institutions. Unnamed “political analysts,” reports The Hill in its coverage of Kmiec’s defection, “say the tension between the…
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…odation on the birth control coverage requirement was not legally or politically required. But by reacting to Democratic pundits’ amplification of the complaints of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other conservative Catholics, Obama’s actions may have the effect of strengthening the hand of Democrats who insist that the party needs to be more religious. Some observers, like Amanda Marcotte at Slate, have argued that Obama’s action wea…
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…rom Southampton to the New World in 1630: We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of…
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…It’s usually clear to Bart Ehrman who loves him and who hates him. Evangelical Christians have been raking Ehrman over the coals for years for his rejection of biblical inerrancy—and atheists and humanists have embraced his writing as ammunition in the fight against the evils of organized religion. With his new book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman is making friends of his enemies and enemies of his friends as he debunks the work of so-called “mythicists…
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