Religion Dispatches
…ty of indiscriminate violence. Too many people—not just dentists on Virgin Airlines—make statements like, “Muslims don’t do enough to reject terrorism.” It’s probable many of them have never met Muslims. If they tried, they might be surprised. In fact, the reaction to my essay—you’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept La…
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…y is that it is not limited to religiopolitical violence. Lankford cites a number of American suicide terrorists that exhibited “classic suicidal traits.” Like Joseph Stack, a divorced software engineer with tax problems. In 2010, Stack crashed his single-engine plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS manager; “There isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken [with me],” Stack wrote in the…
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…ernment meddling with religion,” mused John Adams, reflecting on his failed 1800 re-election bid. As president, he mixed church and state, a mistake he ultimately blamed for his electoral loss. Adams had called for a national fast, a governmental overreach which he believed “turned me out of office.” But when the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774, Adams lacked the benefit of this hindsight. Without it, he and the other delegat…
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…unding the National Conservative movement is not without precedent. Between 1800 and 1950, Europe endured what amounted to a second Catholic Counter-Reformation. In the latter portion of the 19th century, predominantly Catholic countries in Europe—which of course European nations have largely been since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia—experienced an upsurge of royalist and irredentist passions to which the Catholic Church often attached itself (for e…
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…rine Band playing some of the same “airs” it played for Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Compared to royal coronations, American inaugurations are remarkably simple affairs. But our ceremonies retain their own majesty and are capable of projecting a strong sense that something sacred is happening. Our inaugurations have always reflected a mashup of civil religion—invocations of our secular sacred texts, appeals to mystic chords of national memory—and bit…
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…, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbers are 14% and 40% respectively, etc). The crisis has already condemned low-income families to a shocking level of food insecurity, with one-fifth of American kids now at risk of going to bed hungry each night. Many of those forced to work—especially women of color—will sicken and die in a too-rapid “reopening” aimed at saving businesses. The rapidly widening divide be…
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…ntury. The average woman went from bearing about seven or eight children in 1800, to between three and four by 1900, in tandem with the industrial revolution. And among the native-born white population that Douthat is so concerned about, average family size was even smaller. A two-child family was already the norm for many middle and upper-middle class Protestant women, leading men like Theodore Roosevelt to decry “race suicide” and the “base and…
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…r greed, deception, and capitalist success…and he’s running for president. For historians, the picture you are painting is determined by where you put the frame. Since I put the frame at 1800, I’m okay. But if I put it at 2016, I might be hanging myself. * * * Also on The Cubit: Donald Trump has turned Islam into the new communism…
Read More…at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and attempted to locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a magical ritual that combined Islamic elements with shamanic practices. On Thursday Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as Rajah Bomoh Sedunia Nujum, delivered a press conference (in which he demonstrated a squint that bore an uncanny resemblance to Pat Robertson.) He initially stated that he had been invited to perform his ritual by one of Malaysia’s “…
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…disappointed to see that Humanists were not included in today’s interfaith service. Eboo Patel, Founder and President of Interfaith Youth Core offered these comments: Atheists and secular humanists should absolutely be included in interfaith memorial ceremonies. They represent 20% of the population, and they grieve and hope with the same intensity that believers do. Furthermore, institutions like the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard are shaping lang…
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