Religion Dispatches
…who is might be willing to give Christianity a second look—those who are “spiritual-but-not-religious” and the “church alumni club.” And those who might be completely post-religious and just want to read a good story about interesting people in the past. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I always want my readers—of my books, blogs, or articles—to say, “I’ve never really seen the world from that angle before…
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Over the last year or two, I’ve become an unironic, unapologetic fan of reality TV. I know the criticisms—they dumb us down, they elevate public humiliation—but what I’m really interested in is the way shows like Spike’s Joe Schmo Show or VH1’s I Love Money turn into morality plays about the value of friendship and loyalty. In the best reality shows, the initial rush of schadenfreude is gradually replaced with a genuine affection for the “good gu…
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…to keep former black slaves from full participation in society for another 100 years. Only in the 1960s were African Americans given full legal rights in public life. Then in 1968 came the election of Nixon with his “Southern Strategy.” Ronald Reagan was the first president to explicitly seek the vote of a religious right, now emerging as part of a white backlash against the gains of black citizens in the 1960s. It must be recognized that the Sou…
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…logne. Could there be a connection that one hundred years later, Pope Urban 11 launched the first crusade promising Christian warriors paradise after death? “But the death of Jesus was not a key to meaning, not an image of devotion for the Christians of the first millennium,” Parker and Brock write. “He was risen, a healer, baptized, a shepherd, a teacher, and a friend.” This book is a rock-the-foundations work. Christians have been thoroughly tau…
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…“40 percent of the ceremonies are Jewish, only 17 percent are Episcopalian, 15 percent are Catholic, 13 percent are other Protestant, and 15 percent are non-religious or non-denominational.” Twelve years later, Jews remain in the lead, although with only 26 percent of the ceremonies. The other cohorts lost statistical heft, too, as 10 percent are Episcopalian, 16 percent are Catholic or Greek Orthodox, 21 percent are other Protestant, and another…
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…ims, based in Pentecostal Word-Faith theology, that all physical ills have spiritual origins. She taught that difficult and painful labors were potentially due to disagreements between the parents over child discipline, while perfect childbirths were the result of proper spiritual preparation. She reportedly has walked out on women in labor on receipt of a prophetic message from God that Satan was deceitfully creating the impression of a troubled…
Read More…emselves up as dispassionate umpires rising above the partisan fray in the spirit of Niebuhrian humility, when Niebuhr himself would tell them that they were just as prone to error as anyone else. Again, I’ll leave it up to my readers to decide if this is fair to the Villagers or not. I will say that after eight years of George W. Bush’s reign of error, calls for a more technocratic form of government sound welcome. I will also say this much. Rose…
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…n on the Web. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? 1) That religion, at the time of its origin back in hunter-gatherer days, had anything to do with morality. Divine sanctions against stealing, lying, etc., aren’t much needed in a hunter-gatherer village, because it’s harder to get away with these things in the first place when you live with a very small number of people. 2) That ancient Israel was monotheistic from the ge…
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…ppi in 1964; and when he returned to his native Bakersfield, California, in 1965 to see for the first time, the plight of Mexican-American farm workers through “Mississippi eyes.” He soon got involved with the farm workers’ movement and over the next 16 years served in a variety of positions, including organizing director and as a member of the board (1973-1981). Getting Out of Egypt Why David Sometime Wins opens with an eye-opening history of lar…
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…just brains in vats is an indirect challenge to such sentiments. That same spirit of subversion has been behind a recent wave of books lambasting religion. Yet the ascent of thinkers like Dawkins, Dennett, and Sam Harris is just one more chapter in the history of science’s victory to becoming the ultimate arbiter of truth. For most of the past century, the humanities, and its penchant for complex theories privileging nurture over nature, directly…
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