Religion Dispatches
…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
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…chuck their violins and abandon a sinking ship. You would think one of the groups rushing to the last lifeboat would be younger conservatives, who might possess better preservation instincts than their parents, having grown up in a different reality. (As Stephen Colbert once said, reality tends to have a liberal bias.) Polling does reflect that younger Republicans aren’t as thrilled about Trump as their older counterparts, with fewer than two-thir…
Read MoreAn emailed press release on the American Bible Society’s 4th annual “State of the Bible” survey arrives with the subtle subject line: “Bible Engaged More Generous.” Exhibit A is a chart showing that, indeed, the “Bible Engaged” appear to give a far larger amount of money to nonprofits than do “Bible Skeptics,” with averages of $3,259 and $584 respectively. In an effort to further emphasize the generosity of the Most Biblical among us, it also not…
Read More“Excuse me sir, are you Jewish?” For years, even the most vaguely semitic-looking man walking the streets of hipster (North) Williamsburg couldn’t avoid the question from one of the young Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men posted at the streetcorners. I have curly hair. I got it often. Now the Chabad have turned it up a notch with “Unite the Beards,” a slick and schlocky video campaign designed to show hipsters that hey, we all have beards… so maybe we’r…
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…tries in Washington DC, who are already engaged with community organizing around economic justice issues. Jones’ community, which has the second-highest unemployment rate in the DC area, has been fighting a Wal-Mart in their neighborhood, pushing for a community benefit agreement with the retailer that would guarantee jobs for local residents who desperately need them. As a faith leader in an African-American congregation with a social gospel hist…
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…interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+ Episcopalians, and especially those who identify under the transgender and nonbinary umbrella, were far more likely than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts to cite a fear that nothing would be done or that they’d be retaliated against as their top reasons not to report instances of sexual abuse to denominat…
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…ability of cell phones to be used for impure activities, some Jewish cell-phone users have requested so-called “kosher” phones. The idea is to offer conservative Jews a phone that is free of “corrupting influences” of the sort that are already avoided by ultra-orthodox Jews through a ban on television and some radio. Reuters reported in February 2008 that Bezeq Israel Telecom launched a new “kosher” landline phone service, which will block calls…
Read More…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…
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…kepocalypse”: for the first time ever, the event sold out. Scalpers hawked tickets for hundreds of dollars over their purchase price and artists who had been working feverishly to finish their projects but had put off purchasing tickets were left out in the cold. It was a different scene in 1997 when I first came to Burning Man and only waited briefly at the entrance as a “Greeter” cast a cursory glance at my car. But the Greeters’ enthusiastic re…
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…of the general trend toward non-affiliation; in fact, it’s the other way around: the unprecedented number of Catholics leaving the church is a major driver of the increase in “nones.” A recent Pew Poll, which provides one of the most detailed looks to date at this phenomenon, found that while 20 percent of US adults currently identify as Catholic, nine percent identify as ex-Catholic, with an additional six percent who were raised Catholic (or wh…
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