Religion Dispatches
…into the media scrum, partly because it is a topical story and I write about religious history, but primarily because I have dealt with this issue off and on for nine years, in one way or another. My first public writing about this was with a colleague at the time, Rosemary Carbine. We jointly wrote a piece that was published in The Marty Center’s Sightings, a publication dealing with religion and public life. It was the beginnings of the America…
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…you’re not gonna wear something as simple as a mask, if you don’t care about their life, you don’t care about their soul. You care [only] about religion,” said Pastor Cue Jn Marie, the pastor of Skid Row’s Church Without Walls and one of the lead organizers of the Resistance Against Biological Warfare. Jn Marie worries the event could spread coronavirus into Skid Row, and said he reached out to Feucht via Facebook last week with no response. It’s…
Read More…is empire at New Life. Lyons went to prison (although that was about sex, but about fraud and larceny). Both Bakker and Swaggart left the Assemblies of God and lost their huge followings. Both men, like Haggard, still pastor small churches. Long paid off his accusers, and is hanging on by a thread at his church. Bryant is still in the pulpit, and Lyons is as well. What is different? All of the white pastors had to leave their denominations/churche…
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…night dancing with, someone who I had spoken to just a week before on the phone, her laughter weakened but still familiar. When I thought about her ashes being scattered around Boston I felt a momentary panic. Where could I ever go to find her again? Last week, just in time for the Feast of All Soul’s Day, celebrated each year on November 2, the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a new Instruction regarding the…
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…Sunday school and we heard about Noah’s Ark and about the Garden of Eden, but without the literal spin. So, personally, I didn’t grow up seeing a lot of conflict between science and religion. That story of perpetual conflict was more something I learned at school. So it was refreshing to discover that there was more complexity, back-and-forth, cross-pollination in the history. I like surprises. You have this great phrase, you say that creationists…
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…ty of Mormon culture. Mormon studies scholars suggest that Mormons living outside of Utah (like other minorities) have developed a “divided sense of self” and a related tendency to adopt a self-monitored or “coded” form of speech with outsiders. Hansen recalls this same insider-outsider mentality from the political struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment, recalling that a man from her Mormon ward “called me, upset because I had written this lette…
Read More…audulent or those who bought and sold lives in mathematical equations without faces. But the spirit was gone; Rove was in disgrace, Cheney was reduced to playing the snarling bogeyman on occasion. Nothing new happened, thanks be to God. And in 2008, I, like so many others, dared to hope. Not in some supposed new Chosen One—that Obama was some messianic figure was an idea rooted only in the firm soil of authoritarian minds opposed to his election—b…
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…t the great TEA Party Day on April 15th.” “I’ve known Newt Gingrich for about 20 years now and I’ve always enjoyed him intellectually, but detested him politically,” Joe Klein recently wrote in his blog for Time. “The reason for the latter is his now-anachronistic first resort to anger; again and again, he cheapens public discourse through exaggeration and wild claims. One imagines that if John McCain were President and Paul Krugman had said, out…
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…0 volunteers who walked precincts in a driving rain, and made thousands of phone calls throughout the weekend to every targeted voter in the district,” McClintock remarked. “I can confidently say that those 2,000 votes were Generation Joshua votes.” Such praise is heady stuff for teenagers who want to feel they can make a difference in their world, who yearn for a sense of efficacy and belonging. More specifically, it assures them that the world o…
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…try experience like for you? That’s still a little close for me to talk about it. But I do feel comfortable saying I’m asking a lot of questions about liturgy. There are moments when worship can drift into something that is simply performative. I’ve done a lot of performance in my life. I know how to perform, and worship I think is supposed to be different. I think people acknowledge that, but then at the same time, I’m not so sure how different i…
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