Religion Dispatches
…ormed an important comparative analysis of such religious anti-Modernism in 1989, in an important book called Defenders of God. In the specifically Catholic context, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI seem to be running from, and actually running against, the progressive spirit of the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, and its new “spirit of openness to the modern world.” But what these men understand as “Modern” is not entirely clear. Per…
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…of Satan’s minions. It all started with MSG. While I was living abroad in China, I found that many expatriates insisted they were highly sensitive to MSG, yet multiple double-blind, placebo-controlled trials had led allergists to conclude MSG sensitivity is largely psychosomatic. In itself, this wasn’t surprising: the mind is well-known for having powerful positive (placebo) and negative (nocebo) effects on health. What surprised me was the dogma…
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…d political order was essential for economic and political development. His 1991 book on democratization, The Third Wave, foresaw the wave of new democratic movements that accompanied the end of the Cold War. In the early 1990s, observers of global politics searched for ways of understanding the new world disorder in the wake of the Cold War and the rise of globalization. Frances Fukuyama proclaimed an “end of history.” Benjamin Barber saw the cen…
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…with: science and quantitative reason. Risk assessment. Data. The reign of Numbers. It has also succeeded in transforming a movement that was originally not only a protest against the denaturalization of the world but the dehumanization of the world. It has remade that movement in its own image. Labor markets, working conditions, and the poor are not part of environmentalism’s problem. And it is certainly not part of an ecologist’s problem. But it…
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…yptic time continued until the messianic figure of Napoleon was defeated in 1815. Once the scales fall from your eyes, as it were, you see millennialism all over the place. Heaven on Earth includes an illuminating chapter on the “political religion” of the Nazis, and another on “Marx the Rooster,” grinding away at his “scientific” visions while his family starved. Landes also provides a dense but informative chapter on the Taiping Rebellion of Chi…
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…istorical screen: it took over a thousand years to build the Great Wall of China; decades for the ancient Egyptians to build the pyramids; 14 years to complete Mount Rushmore; over ten years for James Cameron to get Avatar to the big screen. This month is the second-year anniversary for Religion Dispatches, which launched in February 2008. While RD has not yet reached the heights and scale of the achievements just mentioned, we are off to a surpri…
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…ul white male scholar, Jan Joosten, had downloaded over 27,000 pictures and 1,000 videos of child pornography over a period of at least six years. Some of these victims were children “originaires d’Asie ou des pays de l’Est” (originating in Asia or Eastern countries). Which is to say that they’re marked as non-white Asian children. We don’t know the proportion of Asian victims to non-Asians, but no other ethnic or national marker is mentioned. We…
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…d players like Daniel Berrigan. They were the word-made-flesh team. Between 1995 and 1998 I had three children. By the time the youngest was a year old, I was schlepping all three to Sunday mass. On September 11, 2001, the day the towers fell, I went to pray in my church while two miles away my priests were blessing buckets of body parts. On a blisteringly sunny April morning in 2004, after being up all night, I knocked on my pastor’s door asking…
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…eal reflection of the escape from political oppression to the approximately 100 million Christians just beginning to worship freely in China. Peterson remarks that understanding everything from “the nuances of Islam’s views on women, the role of Christian doctrines in colonialism, and how the Reformation continues to influence trade relations” is integral to developing new approaches in areas like international development, conflict resolution, an…
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…complex in Afghanistan, a term used by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961, can be traced back to the 1950s during Eisenhower’s own administration. The US also played a major military role in the pivotally located nation for the duration of Sharbat Gula’s life. Most notably in the 1980s during the Reagan administration and Operation Cyclone; and most recently in every presidential administration during and since September 11, 2001. The white…
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