Religion Dispatches
…been set for Kelly’s excommunication court when one high-ranking LDS official remarked at a regional leadership meeting in Virginia that support for women’s ordination should be considered a form of apostasy. That instruction and the news of the pending courts seems to have created a climate wherein local ecclesiastical leaders may now feel obliged or empowered to take action towards less orthodox members of their congregations. I dream tonight o…
Read More…e under assault. At the same time, defeating these groups fosters a narrative in which Catholics have triumphed over a truly demonic foe. Daniels claims he wants to show his defiance to Christian hegemony, but so far he has only demonstrated how well conservative Christianity responds to a Satanic foil….
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…ood intentions, it was somewhat off-putting when Frank Weathers at Patheos described Foley as a Christian martyr in his death. Not only because he was killed explicitly for his nationality and not for his religion, but also because the prospect of the hellscape that is the battleground on which ISIS fights becoming a destination for competitive martyrdom can do no one any good. In the absence of any evidence, we cannot know whether James Foley mai…
Read More…il messages addressed to the Oklahoma Capital Preservation Commission—an amazing archive for a historian of American religion.* One Oklahoma paralegal felt it would demonstrate the state’s religious diversity, while another accused the legislature of hypocrisy and threatened to take a sledgehammer to the Ten Commandments monument. Aother, referring to the Temple’s statement that Lucifer symbolizes “the selfless revolt against tyranny, free & ratio…
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…one unanswered about how the state should define “religion.” By what criteria should we decide whether deviant beliefs and actions are an expression of religion or evidence of a medical problem? Dr. Kolchak points out that Dobson was not a lone psychotic and that his victims shared his beliefs. The three apparently met through the online organization “Joy of Satan,” and Kolchak argues that murders resembled rituals described on the website. Accord…
Read More…ing the conference, Glassman held a ceremony to invoke “La Siren,”—the Haitian name for the Yoruba sea goddess Yemaja. The ceremony was partly to apologize to the goddess for damage caused by the BP oil spill of 2010, and partly to seek her guidance in finding better forms of water management. Unlike private services like blessings and divination, invoking La Siren for a symposium on water management is an eminently social and even political act….
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…you call the tendency to personify God, to make God one of us, “an act of despair.” That recognition of human grief and the epilogue on the God-loss read to me as very pastoral. A theologian who read this book—very theistic—once she read the manuscript, she said, “You have to say something to us who hate giving up God.” And she said, “I love waking up in the morning and seeing the sun shine and the sky blue and the birds in flight and saying, ‘Th…
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…rtain them? Piss them off? I do think the history of the Baysiders is an amazing story that has never been properly told. So part of my job as a historian is just to “tell a good yarn.” But I am also trying to be fair in how I tell the story. In his work on Scientology, Hugh Urban describes trying to balance a “hermeneutics of suspicion” with a “hermeneutics of respect.” I faced a similar dilemma. Much of what has been written about the Baysiders…
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…before el-Sisi’s quest to appear “more Muslim than the Islamists.” Macedonia: Marriage Ban Put in Constitution This week Macedonia’s parliament voted to define marriage in the Constitution as a union between a man and a woman and reportedly “created a constitutional hurdle to possible future legislation on same-sex unions.” An earlier version of the draft Amendment, which explicitly banned same-sex civil unions or registered cohabitation was stro…
Read More…tegy that serves his own business interests. A recent profile in the Christian Post noted how the Faith and Freedom Coalition is housed right next door to Reed’s (and Phillips’) Century Strategies, and it has “the look and feel of a campaign headquarters.” “That’s what this is,” Marx told the Post. “Pure and simple.” It’s 2012’s version of the Christian Coalition: melding evangelicals with the tea party issues they’re already comfortable with, but…
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