Religion Dispatches
…peaks directly to God,” be updated each time the church gets a new president? At least Russell M. Nelson has the same cadence as Thomas S. Monson, so the transition to new lyrics should be about as seamless as the transition to a new straight white American male LDS president….
Read More…damnation for things (like homosexuality) that millennials see as simply judgmental and unfair. If organized religion can’t renew itself from the inside, this new generation will switch to a new platform—even if they have to invent it for themselves….
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…rmines the clerical control that the Pope’s message is intent on securing. Users, Not Consumers New social media is defined primarily in contrast to not to print, but to broadcast media: radio, movies, television. Where the latter is characterized by passive reception of a message crafted outside the immediate experience of the audience, social media today is by its nature participatory, interactive, collaborative, distributive, and, importantly,…
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…onference,” Dr. Dorothee E. Benz, national representative of Methodists in New Directions (MIND) and a New York annual conference delegate to the 2016 General Conference, told RD. Dr. Benz echoes the sentiments of many who see the decision of these two BOOMs as signs of progress and something to be celebrated while they remain cautious about what progress will be made at General Conference. Many wonder whether schism is unavoidable. A more importa…
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…rly culture and it continues to value freedom of enquiry, the discovery of new materials, and the promotion of novel points of view. What you sense most clearly at the Vatican Library is that popes come and go, as professors do, but books and the society of learning remain. We are all links in a chain, not just the men who claim an apostolic succession going back to Peter. The fact that this book is on display in that Library now is something for…
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…ence both prior to, and during, January 6, research he describes both in a new epilogue to the paperback edition of his book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, as well as in the new report. As Seidel put it during the February 9 webinar: “America is a shared idea. And Christian nationalism refuses to share. It excludes non-Christians and the wrong kind of Christians, as this report shows…. This is the choice we face as a…
Read More…It’s the new dark ages.” How was this heard in Rome, in the context of the new conservatism, the new oligarchy, and the new barbarism of the second regime of Roberto Berlusconi? They can burn books, records, and they can torch the environment. And how, by contrast, was it heard by me, an expatriate North American, who heard these same images—of burned books and new dark ages—when given voice by a bright young man from San Francisco? They can burn…
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…during the 1950s to form a unified, unifying, and unabashedly progressive new denomination: the United Church of Christ. But the new body never quite took off. Lots of big Congregational churches, on both the most liberal and most conservative margins, refused to sign up for the new configuration in 1957. The more liturgical “German” Reformed wing (the old Evangelical and Reformed Church) mistrusted the Yankees and vice versa. Today’s UCC, at 1.3…
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…graphical is the feeling of alienation; of being Jewish when you’re not in New York. Because some of the things I experienced in different countries, like these characters did, where, when you leave your enclaves, like New York and L.A., and you go to places like London or Warsaw, it’s still kind of weird to be Jewish. It’s just not that big of a deal in a lot of cities in America. But when you go abroad, you realize it’s a different thing to be….
Read More…ms of violence are to be appreciated more than others. If the words of Fox News can lead to an arson attack against a mosque, and general Islamophobia results in knifings in pizzerias, then the words and actions of the Mayor of New York have a much more profound impact. Muslims in the city are bombarded by media coverage that paints us as suspect. The city’s police department paints us as suspect. Advertising in the veins of the city paints us as…
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