Religion Dispatches
…ity has lived up to the teachings of its founder. A People’s History isn’t about war; it is about love of God and love of neighbor. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? The book is aimed at Western Christians, particularly mainline Protestants, social justice Roman Catholics, progressive and emergent evangelicals. But I hope it invites anyone who is might be willing to give Christianity a second look—those who are “spiritual-but-…
Read More
…condoms). But the biggest move was capturing the terrain of therapy-speak about psychological health. It’s not about hellfire anymore. Repression has now been repackaged as promotion of mental well-being. Suddenly everything is about low self-esteem: homosexuality, abortions, pornography, premarital sex. The Bush administration mandated in 2006 that high school curricula dependent on federal funding (and at that point 46 of the 50 states took fed…
Read More
…portant insight, and it took me twenty years to write a confessional essay about my experiences on short-term mission trips in Russia and how they contributed to my loss of faith. In terms of misconceptions, one that’s related to Lauren’s comments about “bitterness” is the widespread notion that Christianity, and maybe all “real” religion, is inherently benign. The truth is that some religion wounds. Some religion kills. Some religion absolutely d…
Read More
…tudes that define fundamentalist culture. The same day I received the news about Gomes and about the HU Queer Press, Huffington Post religion writer Cathleen Falsani suggested that there are major shifts in attitudes about homosexuality among younger generations of evangelical Christians—shifts in attitude if not belief. I’m not of that younger generation, but I’m deeply moved by what I see happening—especially as I read the Harding webzine last w…
Read More
…spiritual discussions have migrated. There she read some revelatory tweets about a friend’s Sunday school conversation about how the slaughtered lamb in the prodigal son parable represents the oppressed. “Someone else screws up and I’m the one who has to pay for it,” she recalls reading. It gave her a new perspective on the familiar passage and she thought, “Oh wow, I got more out of these three tweets than I did out of sitting in church for two h…
Read More
…net’s are clear, and even if Dreher argues that the Benedict Option is not about Christian withdrawal, Christian dominance of social policies is about to become the law of the land. And yet, pushback from people of many faiths has been immediate, and real. If Dreher wants to preach to a choir beyond other conservative Christians, this may prove to be a tricky moment to do so. Faith-based activism that stands in opposition to much of what Dreher wr…
Read More
…s don’t usually talk about culture or politics. Instead, they focus on the science, or on science outreach. (Collect all the writing detailing or examining the appeal of the anti-vaxxer stance, and you’d have another very thin file). But what could be more modern, and more conformist, than the government-recommended schedule of vaccines? The medical system is huge. It’s hierarchical. It’s powerful. It creates rules that apply to the entire populat…
Read More
…ca’s mash-up of sci-fi and soap opera—which speaks to Henry’s observations about worlds we can learn from versus the world we live in—but I like that about the series. I like being disoriented by the bobble-headed bull, first because it comes from my world and then because it means something different on Caprica. I felt similarly when Baxter chided the “destructo God” in the sky. The distance/no-distance between Caprica’s God and our own gave me p…
Read More
…e we used were Alix Spiegel’s 1997 This American Life radio story, “Pray” (about the strange goings on at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church); Jane Lampman’s two September 1999 Christian Science Monitor stories on The World Prayer Center and the ‘spiritual mapping’ movement; and René Holvast’s 2005 dissertation for the University of Utrecht, “Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Paradigm,” which has been reworked into a book…
Read More
…eads an incredulous charge 5. The Talmud really does say some nasty things about certain non-Jews, and about a fellow named Jesus, although the 13th century rabbis could dispute whether or not this was the same Jesus of New Testament fame. And the Talmud really does contain statements about God arguing, changing his mind, weeping, and even praying to Himself—statements that might be surprising to many of today’s Jews, and that certainly seemed bla…
Read More