Religion Dispatches
…overbial “voice in the wilderness,” Ron Paul’s world is about to change. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 74% of Americans strongly favor a plan to audit the Federal Reserve, something Paul has advocated for years. He plans to push such a plan as the new chair of the House Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee that oversees the Fed and its monetary policy. Reportedly Republican leaders had planned to put someone else in that position but appointed…
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…of the House. It didn’t help Blaine’s cause when one of his supporters, a New York clergyman, declared that the Republican Party represented the country’s last defense against “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Both prairie populism and urban populism surged on into the 1890s, although the two never managed to combine effectively and both were marred and hobbled by the deep-seated racism of white populists. Significantly, it was South Carolina popul…
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…trange that Bellah believed his recommendations amounted to anything truly new, much less something as perplexing as a “new religious consciousness.” Stranger still is why Bellah would use such tendentious language at all; especially when he must have known how many red flags it would have set off among his political enemies on campus. Thus, when we take such talk of a department of religious studies being the breeding grounds for a “new religious…
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…ress is anyone’s guess. I still take the Gramscian position toward social change: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. And I never cease to hope for new light and new energy from the heart of faith around the rights and dignity of working people….
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…umans or Earth as in any way unique or inevitable. Coyne does set off in a new and productive direction when he calls out many of those attempting the Great Reconciliation who blame the ‘new atheists’ for cultural discord. The line is that all these atheist scientists, Richard Dawkins and his book The God Delusion (2006) being the epitome, are inciting the masses by heaping abuse on religion and proclaiming the superiority of scientific reason. Bu…
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…, but not without a fight. Outraged citizens burned copies of the proposed new Constitution in organized street protests from New York to South Carolina. But eventually the thing was ratified, and a very different situation emerged, one in which US citizens could be taxed, but only by a federal government in which each of them had representation (and thus a theoretical stake), especially in the legislative branch, which was given the authority to…
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…er 14 of 27 documents. When the book of Revelation comes at the end of the New Testament, it makes the whole of the New Testament sound as if we’re still looking forward to the second coming of Jesus and what is popularly called ‘the end of the world.’ When the book of Revelation appears more or less in the middle, we see it, hear it and understand it as a document produced in a particular time and place that tells us about what that Christ commun…
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…their childhood. And the culture war retains its warriors. Kevin DeYoung’s new culture war strategy isn’t new, but it is effective. However, winning this war means everybody loses. A healthy and vibrant society doesn’t advance itself through the imposition of sectarian interests, but through meaningful engagement with a plurality of cultures and ideas. Rather than catechize children to win culture wars, let’s raise them with values of respect and…
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…For example, the artist Michael Takeo Magruder offers an experience of the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21) in one of his VR projects, aptly named “A New Jerusalem.” Representing transcendent states—whether in places like heaven or conditions like bliss—has challenged artists for centuries. In the 21st century, look for an expanding array of attempts to use the metaverse to provide a glimpse of transcendent realities (through an Oculus darkly?). Whil…
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…us (RIP) said nothing about new ideas or worlds within. It was all about a new land, a new world defined strictly geographically. As long as the myth was vibrant, it assured Americans that they needed no sophisticated concepts. The land of the United States itself (which became, in the U.S. version of the myth, synonymous with the “America” Columbus “discovered”) would be the paradise Columbus sought. It would exude all of his mythic qualities: co…
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