Religion Dispatches
…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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…tive. He was a hopped-up, stoned version of Jon Stewart, who once told Fox News, which had charged that his news program was slanted: “but my show is on Comedy Central!” Thompson was able to awaken his readers to the absurdity of their lives by documenting the absurdity of his. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s comment to Dan Quayle in their vice presidential debate: Max Blumenthal is no Hunter Thompson. Blumenthal’s Goliath is not funny, nor is it ve…
Read More…were fully intact, would we even have Trump running things right now? The new ad is clearly intended to shut down any actual reflection on this point and to associate voting for Biden with making your worries go away. Replace a scary old white man with a (more) benign one. What could be simpler? 2. Treating Trump and Trumpism under the “aberration” category is dangerously misleading (also something else that many of us know in our bones). Trump’s…
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…Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford, 2013); Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford, 2013). Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion,1805-1900; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism and Modernity, 1900-1950; and Dorrien The Making of American Liberal Theology…
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…as catechized by youth group leaders, missionaries who had the zeal to add numbers to their newsletter reports—uh, I mean, for the Kingdom. Of course, as a child, I didn’t have the awareness of this culture war strategy, I simply believed I was being taught the love and grace of a good God. When I grew older and, gasp, developed my own critical thinking abilities, I began to see with more clarity the unspoken strategies put in place to ensure I st…
Read More…hem! “It is pathetic to see our media houses parading these dogs on TV and newspapers hiding behind human rights — human rights my foot! The devil has no rights!” Catholic Church: Interview with Fired Gay Priest LGBT News Italia published an interview with Krzysztof Charamsa, the Polish priest who was forced out of his Vatican job after coming out on the eve of the bishops’ family synod in the fall. In the interview by Andrea Miluzzo (with English…
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…able remained a feature of family life. Meanwhile, religious leaders found new ways to reach people in their homes. In the nineteenth century, missionaries traveled from house to house, delivering religious texts and newspapers to support reading and prayer. In the twentieth century, Charles Fuller and Billy Graham pioneered radio and television. Children’s programming from Davey and Goliath to VeggieTales has offered Christian alternatives to mor…
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…to be written that would carry The Cosmic Way of Warfare farther back than Newton. But Newton—an alchemist obsessed with decoding prophecy—hardly spelled a definite break in which the religious transmuted into the scientific. And religious ways of warfare hardly disappeared as scientific ones arose. A fuller cosmology of warfare would embrace both. Religion and science each provide resources for thinking through the chaos of combat. If, as Bousque…
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…other reason that Anderson deserves recognition as an honorary scholar of new religious movements is that his curiosity about new religions has brought him into conflict with a culture that still approaches the religious other through an un-nuanced “us vs. them” mentality. Most religion scholars who deal heavily with new religious movements have been branded as “cult apologists” at some point in their careers. At stake in this accusation is an as…
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…in this muddiness, this liminal zone of human relationship, that something new is being born, new life is being fashioned—and we don’t know what that’s going to look like yet. The liminal place can’t stay liminal forever, even though it feels like it in a postmodern age – it feels like we’re going to be living in fluidity for the next-however-long it’s going to be. We are human beings, and we build things. The question that I have is: Can we build…
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