Religion Dispatches
…do it.’” As the two baristas chatted, agreeing on culturally relativistic values on gender, I struggled on my private darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of discomfort and delight. When a young American calls for non-interference in “their” business because “they” are different, I am relieved and disturbed. I contrast the non-interfering liberal with the large young Midwestern ex-GI in my class years ago: “Saddam is the Antichrist, and we’…
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…y. The Times piece highlighted the divide in the school district, which is flanked by two liberal arts schools, Kenyon College and Mount Vernon Nazarene University. One of Freshwater’s move vocal supporters, Dave Daubenmire, is the creator of the town’s Minute Men United, a militant organization that endorses Christian theocracy. Two years ago, according to the Columbus Dispatch, Minutemen led protests at religious services of two local churches t…
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…populations. But the scholarship suggests that Jefferson meant political rivals who had the understanding of “uneducated savages.” The full complicated story includes that. The point I want to make with my own book is that the story of the Jefferson Bible is as much about the twentieth and twenty-first century as it is about the eighteenth and nineteenth. This Jefferson Bible is something Americans have used to make sense of our founding and make…
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…d I ask my girlfriend to marry me? Should I major in engineering or art?—influence our actions. Such a conclusion flies in the face of common sense. Of course, sometimes we deliberate insincerely, toward a foregone conclusion, or we fail to act upon our resolution. But not always. Sometimes we consciously choose to do something and we do it. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but it often does. Moreover, free will must exist, if som…
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…strategies attempted by the families described. Their stories also show baffling variability, with some absorbing Trump’s election loss or seeing people they know personally get severely ill from Covid-19 and start to change—but others will not. What comes across most strongly is how difficult it is to help; how even trying can pull you down instead. The moments where family members lose friends or fail exams because of their QAnon-afflicted spous…
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…offered human sacrifice to save the sun as the sky darkened, nor that medieval Catholics flocked to confession when an eclipse approached—and nor even that, as Reilly describes, a small band of eclipse-chasers even today spend their lives pursuing the weird rush of standing beneath a covered sun. An eclipse quite literally upends one of the basic premises upon which human life functions: that the sun should rise in the morning and set at night. It…
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…ve written on the case of John Errol Ferguson, a schizophrenic murderer in Florida, who claimed that upon his execution he alone would be seated at the Right Hand of God before being resurrected to save America from a communist plot. Under federal law, the mentally ill cannot be executed—psychiatrists had even identified a fissure in Ferguson’s brain consistent with schizophrenia. However, Florida’s eighth circuit ruled that Ferguson’s delusions w…
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…percent on credit cards, and 500 percent or more on payday loans, capital flees honest pursuits.” And did capital ever flee, according to Geoghegan’s great tale of cupidity unbound. He describes what happened, accurately, as an “autocatalytic reaction”: there was so much worldwide investment capital demanding a piece of the lending action in this country that Wall Street couldn’t resist inventing sketchy new products to induce consumers to sink t…
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…fight. If someone had pressed into his fingers at that pivotal moment the phone number for The Trevor Project, he might reach out and hear a voice of reassurance, a voice that gave him hope for life by, in part, repudiating the so-called biblical teaching that who he is amounts to an offense against God. If he’d had a sense of belonging to a community that embraced him for who he is, maybe his hope wouldn’t be so fully shattered. But while other…
Read More…explore the ways that a person can engage Christianity in a fresh way that values both the mind and the heart. This has been an incredibly fun book to write and I can’t wait for it to be available. Talk to the person who doesn’t know anything about Springfield, mainly tries to ignore Christianity, but who has just seen your video and is giving you a standing ovation. What do you want to say to that person? First of all, I’d like to say thank you….
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