Religion Dispatches
…hetoric deployed by Reverend Young to sell his Christian “sexperiment” illustrates just how far evangelical Christianity has moved in its accommodation to modern American culture. The logic expressed in Young’s pronouncements owes far more to the culture of self-help than it does to the language of the New Testament or to Orthodox Christian theology. And that is what I thought should give evangelicals pause. But we need to be biblically and theolo…
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…ly got so tiresome to write FYROM, or to say the whole name, that people just started saying “Macedonia,” for short. And that’s roughly how the battle was lost. There are countless other examples of place-names gaining a sexual resonance. “Greek” love is one such example, which also took on new meaning among the Romantics in the 19th century. Perhaps more pertinent to this case are the names “Sodomy” and “Sodomite.” A Sodomite was, once-upon-a-tim…
Read More…properly turned down, the faint sound of heels clicking. Given gruesome past instances of prying, spying, and coercion of the conscience by state actors over centuries, one might imagine that American religious leadership would be up in arms at this moment. Our bloody history makes clear that all religion that is not state-dominated has a dog in this fight. But all we’re hearing from the religious sector so far has been a whimper, not a roar. It…
Read More…oes not mean being socially conservative (William Brennan was a Catholic justice who strongly favored reproductive rights and faced death threats and demands that he be excommunicated for those views) somehow the current crop of justices tilts right. The five Catholic justices seem to mirror the early prejudices of the court against African Americans in their decisions related to women. It was the five Catholics (Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Ro…
Read More…like children arguing in the sandlot about who started a fight. The scientists are still crying “foul” over what was done to Galileo by the Vatican (forgetting that he did some of this to himself). The new traditionalists are still crying “foul” at Modern philosophers and scientists for jettisoning the Aristotelian tradition of enquiry (forgetting that their own internecine squabbles had a lot to do with that). The religionists these days—and they…
Read More…ns playfully imagine. And George Will, who is nothing if not doggedly consistent in most of his political commitments, has done an elegant job of exploring and explaining the close connection between baseball and democracy. The best team in the major leagues, Will reminds us, will lose nearly half of its games. Baseball is an exhausting thing to care about, a continual source of heartbreak, an elaborate choreography of loss, and a sentimental educ…
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…ge to the Book of Discipline. There was even a magazine the liberal Methodist Student Movement put out that ran from the 1940s to the 1970s called motive (the lowercase “m” was deliberate) which called for full LGBTQ liberation. “Our history is one of both discrimination and resistance to that discrimination,” Rebecca says. “Right now, those who stand on the side of discrimination wish to rewrite that history, by labeling their positions as ‘tradi…
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…ng costs of two wars, an ideological commitment to deregulation and an almost staggering faith in the power of free markets. It is easy to forget the way Bush’s career began. He managed to lose 20 million dollars on the surest of sure things: Texas oil. His father’s friends paid the notes when they came due. So he rolled the dice again, on a long-shot this time, and won big, unseating his well-loved opponent as governor of Texas. And thus was a ga…
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…to one’s own implication in this system of oppression is the essential first step to dismantling it. What alternative title would you give the book? Jane Manning James told a friend near the end of her life, “I am white with the exception of the color of my skin.” This is a stunning and heart-wrenching confession. But one that encapsulates much of the theology that I explore in the book. I thought about titling the book with this powerful quote….
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…o-called Republican Revolution of 1994, Weyrich had his eyes on the prize: steadfastly working to figure out how conservatives could regroup and rebuild from the ashes of the overwhelming defeat suffered by Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Weyrich, labeled an anti-Semite for repeating the blood libel that “Christ was crucified by the Jews,” back in 2001, nevertheless had an extraordinary list of accomplishments: He “start…
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