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MLK’s ‘Dream’, Unrealized and Undigested

By Svend White

…racial lines, he lost support among many erstwhile allies. Some of King’s most important and heartfelt beliefs have gone done the memory hole, it seems. Deepti Hajela writes in the piece: “Everyone knows, even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King, can say his most famous moment was that ‘I have a dream speech,’” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo. “No one can go further th…

Ping-Pong Politics After Underwear Bomber

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ldly. We will be screened by full body scanners in the very near future at most US airports, and one can already imagine the inevitable security, and other, lapses this will create in the era of the internet. We also intend to engage in very frank and unapologetic profiling, based on country of origin, and at least implicitly, on religious affiliation. Ping: liberty. Pong: security. In this case, pong trumps ping, and our diminished civil libertie…

RDBook: Whither the Religious Left?

By Bill Berkowitz

…ve agenda. There is even talk about a revivified Religious Left. Thus far, most of that talk has centered on the outreach efforts to evangelicals being made by the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama. Is there room for a Religious Left whose political principles, beliefs and activities extend beyond the boundaries of the center-left wing of the Democratic Party? Religion Dispatches had the opportunity to interview Frederick Clarkson, the…

Hamlet’s Wager, or, The Ghost of Capitalism

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…magic. There is no laborer or artist creating surplus value; there is, at most, the specter of the Market—imagined as a body with a circulation, and a personality with psychological needs and anxieties and melancholy, as well with what Adam Smith famously called an “invisible hand.” So either our world is no longer Modern, or else the Modern world never really got rid of the ghosts. For specters abound in the contemporary world, and they are ever…

Comedians on God’s Family Issues

By Gwynne Watkins

…working his way around to the question If God is our father, what happened to our mom? Another great comedian who has pondered the dynamics of God’s family is Eddie Izzard. Here, he imagines God chewing out Jesus for saying weird stuff at the Last Supper. (“Why didn’t you just say, drink this wine, it’s a merlot?”) And for the Christian perspective, here’s comedian Michael Jr. pondering what it must have been like for Jesus’s little brother, the…

The Unbearable Magnetism of Watching Obama Slip on a Banana Peel

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…this kind of theatrical overexposure. Even FDR, whose situation is perhaps most comparable to this president’s first hundred days, only broadcast thirty “fireside chats” in twelve years. He was painfully aware of the dangers of media exposure. This is a cautionary tale for any president in the era of the postmodern media. This is the warning that Greek drama provides. It is a warning that gains salience once we understand the essential link betwee…

Thanksgiving Reveals More About Us Than About 17th Century Events

By Ed Simon

…he nation that held disestablishment of an official religion as one of its most sacred dictates, and which could still speak of political concepts as being “sacred dictates.” Louis A. Ruprecht goes to the source of much contemporary thinking about this enigma, the steadfastly secular nation that has the soul of a church, when he writes about Robert Bellah, the sociologist who coined the term “American civil religion.” In Thanksgiving, even more th…

Christian Charity Meets Its Match: If You Missed “The Overnighters,” Here’s Why You Should See It Now

By Beatrice Marovich

…sformation of western North Dakota, makes the news for many reasons. But almo*]}*st none of them are, in any obvious way, religious. Most recently there’s been talk of how regulation policies for shipping North Dakota crude may have contributed to the derailment and explosion of a train in West Virginia. What’s happening on the oil patch is, in essence, an environmental crisis. So it would make sense if the bulk of oil boom news were related to these…

Claude, Adieu: A Farewell to Lévi-Strauss

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ngs are never simple in Lévi-Strauss’s universe. His long years in Brazil, most of them spent probing tentatively for untouched “primitive” experience, failed to deliver what he wanted or expected. No matter how far into the Brazilian interior he went, he was unable to find people who had not had prior contact with European explorers. His quest for the pristine Other kept rebounding back upon the interrogating European Self. “There is no way out o…

What Passover Taught Me About Being Black

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…inic Judaism, the High Holy Days (Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur) signify the most sacred period in the Jewish calendar. For Hebrew Israelites, however, Passover is the most symbolically important biblical holiday, as it’s the celebration of freedom over slavery. But more importantly it’s typological proof that the biblical God cares about Black people. For Hebrew Israelites, if God could hear the cries of their biblical ancestors then He will act ag…