Religion Dispatches
…uring the Lenten season is no coincidence. Typically this is a time for American Christians to saturate themselves in a premature Easter triumphalism; thus the abyss is never broached. Many religious people in general and Christian people in particular will not be able to dwell in the sustained, unresolved lament of Untitled Unmastered. So the prophets do it for them. And it came to pass after the slavery of America and its plundering of dark bodi…
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…s know, all too well, that it is “terrorism” when the victims are white Americans—otherwise it’s simply a “hate crime.” But, then again, it can only be a hate crime if the perpetrators are white Americans, otherwise it’s “terrorism.”) Somehow the story is more easily told when we don’t have to talk about race—because no one knows how to talk about when people of color attack other people of color. But when reports refer to an attack on a “gay nigh…
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…elate to. We’ve lost the ability to help weave them back together. This American life, where democracy apparently means that everyone can own their own weapon of mass destruction, is one place where it feels like double death itself is doubling. We are unequipped—socially, politically, intellectually, psychologically, spiritually—to cope with death on this scale. I believe that one of the reasons why we’re so unequipped to do this is because so ma…
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…on was transmitted to their insurers by some administrative means, be it a phone call, email or letter. So after years of fighting the mandate, and accusing women’s health advocates and public health official of not understanding why it was a violation of their faith for their insurer to provide birth control that they neither arranged nor paid for, Notre Dame basically turned around and said “never mind.” What happened to cause this astounding tu…
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…u stand, they’re right, or not.” Maybe it is time to get the muftis on the phone after all. In the United States, at least, religious leaders and politicians have deferred some of society’s most pressing ethical concerns to the wisdom of the market. Calls that the “end of history” lies with neoliberal capitalism are being heard as far as the People’s Republic of China. Not without reason, the 20th century’s question of why free markets has been re…
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…aven” flag, originally from the Revolutionary War era, is no ordinary historical flag. It’s been claimed by the most extreme right-wing Christian nationalists of the New Apostolic Reformation. They write: [It was] adopted by Dutch Sheets, a Wagner disciple and a famous apostle in his own right, in 2013. Sheets claimed that this Colonial American military flag was a prophetic symbol of the Third Great Awakening that would arrive as soon as Christia…
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…ruling our patriotic certainties, our geographic support network. In an America that is permanently at war, and yet banishes that war to robots and surveillance and conversations we’d rather not (and so don’t) have, is it any wonder we can imagine CIA agents being just like us? The question we should ask is one every movie studio already has an answer to: Who are Americans ready to cheer for? The man who wants to use the nuke? Of course not. He’s…
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…in the “real” physical environment of the player, as mediated through the phone’s camera. As one player told a reporter: “This is full on escapism, where I’m like ‘let me just go catch some Pokémon and ignore the news.’” What news is she talking about? The murders of Sterling and Castile and the Dallas police officers. She is referring to the news of death. But in a matter of days Pokemon Go has changed our relationship with death. This is new te…
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…group. The essays they wrote explaining these links could be stunningly intricate. That intricacy was part of the appeal. The arguments were so complex that they were impossible to summarize and therefore very challenging to refute. As one longtime believer, an accountant, told me: “Based on everything we know, and when you look at the timelines, you look at the evidence—these aren’t the kind of things that just happen. They correlate too strongly…
Read More…wish tradition, and still claim a Jewish identity. In a major survey of American Jews a few years ago, the Pew Research Center asked American Jews whether it was possible to still be Jewish if you accept Jesus as the messiah. Despite the matrilineal legal technicalities, a substantial majority said No. The larger point here is that ethnic identity is complicated. While some Jews are willing to understand Jewishness exclusively in ancestral terms,…
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