Religion Dispatches
…n national television, they offer relief from the battle over what an American can look like. As an Advocacy and Civic Engagement Coordinator for the National Network for Arab American Communities (a network of organizations across 11 states), Sarsour represents a strong, independent voice. She’s been selected as a “Champion of Change” by the White House, calls Trump a “fascist” on national television, has been arrested by the NYPD at a Black Live…
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…agree with you. In fact one of the things that I struggle with, philosophically, is that we can distinguish between the religious and the secular, but in reality—in lived life—it’s very gray to me where one stops and the other begins. We all have this yearning for moral significance in the world. I think what distinguishes a so-called secular from a religious person is the religious person attempts to frame the moral structure of reality with the…
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…us part is the meta-message of the book, which is, “Hey, you know what, we can start shining a flashlight around this possibility space.” If I can sit down and make up 40 completely different versions [of the afterlife], then we could, as a community, make up many hundreds and thousands of versions of what might be going on. The important part is the exploration, instead of the pretense to certainty. You have this philosophical commitment to possi…
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…ing. My own take on your book is that you multiply the number of psychological motivations we can associate with religion, and so you’re offering a much better, more useful set of motivations than the previous theorists of religion whom you’ve mentioned. Where I’m hesitant is that you claim you’ve found a set of psychological universals, and here’s my reason: we know that culture affects biology, that there’s a give-and-take between our psychology…
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…ntroversial. I don’t like being controversial. I get abused a lot in mail, phone calls and that sort of thing. I don’t enjoy that. But, if you are controversial in the public arena, the people who have given up on Christianity say, “My God, there must be something more to this story than I realized.” So, being controversial is my doorway to the generation of my own children. “The primary issue in the Christian church today is to get away from orig…
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…IS fighters who captured him as a man in the village to whom he had sold a car. The car dealer was from the Kurdish ethnic community; the man who bought his car was an Arab. When the town was surrounded by ISIS, the militants forcibly divided the population into its Kurdish and Arab groups. One of the Arabs suggested that representatives from both groups wave a white flag and go to the ISIS leaders to negotiate their way out of the situation. That…
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…machination. Stories in respected media outlets warn of aggressive evangelical campaigns “emanating from America,” and “backed by the highest of the land,” and are often accompanied by sound bites or pictures—in this case of George W. Bush, Jr., speaking in front of a large mural of Jesus, that serve, implicitly, to confirm the accusations. Indians are far more aware of what goes on in the United States than vice versa. For example, prominent Indi…
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…0:9). That UU was released during the Lenten season is no coincidence. Typically this is a time for American Christians to saturate themselves in a premature Easter triumphalism; thus the abyss is never broached. Many religious people in general and Christian people in particular will not be able to dwell in the sustained, unresolved lament of Untitled Unmastered. So the prophets do it for them. And it came to pass after the slavery of America and…
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…Americans to oppose slavery. By 1785 the church had ordained the first African-American protestant minister; in 1853 ordained the first woman as clergy since New Testament times; and in 1972 ordained the first openly gay person. So it was no surprise that when marriage equality overcame the last legal hurdle in Arizona, Dorhauer found himself standing in that tradition with other progressive clergy outside the Maricopa County Courthouse holding a…
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…scopalian I was participating in the liturgy. I was living into the liturgical calendar. I was in Sunday School, with certain stories about Jesus and about Scripture. The discussions about what it means to be a Christian or about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, which are common in certain traditions, and where that engagement with Christian identity is so much on the surface and so central to the practices of worship—I don’t think I exper…
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