Religion Dispatches
…l these scenarios, the West always knows best. Indeed, the West may know best because the West can change. Islam, on the other hand, is frozen, stuck in what Dipesh Chakrabarty called the “waiting room of history.” This is not, by the way, an exclusively French dynamic—the simple and inaccurate binary of a dynamic West and a static Islam, mired in the seventh century or a “medieval mindset” is stunningly common. And equally inaccurate. Conclusi…
Read More…work. 2) Follow Harris’s instructions There’s no need to wonder about the best way to critique Harris’s work: you can just follow the very clear instructions he gives. Harris’s explanations of the critiques he wants to see are a tad oblique, but he generally invites two methods of attack: a) Disprove the idea that morality is that which makes everyone the most happy. Luckily, Joesph Bingham has already done this for you. In the University of Chi…
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…cal churches sometimes helped people with food, clothing, and fuel. At its best, religious aid was limited, and churches scrambled for donations to keep benevolent institutions afloat. Then the bottom fell out. The stock market and agricultural markets crashed, unemployment soared, banks failed, and a drought withered a year’s crops. National income dropped by 50 percent. People were starving, and sick, and broken. Churches weren’t doing well eith…
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…nd Margaret Fuller and Charles Sumner and the Oliver Wendell Holmeses. The Best and Brightest with their Harvard and Yale pedigrees, keeping the flame of conscience and freedom alive in the face of ignorance and evil. Today the most formidable exponent and curator of the Noble New England legacy is Marilynne Robinson, who writes ceaselessly—and powerfully, let it be said—about the gifts showered upon us by high-minded New England Protestants. As m…
Read More…Zvan knows that, at their best, stories are not just about amusement. The best ones may actually be true somehow. Is Naff’s truncated religious story true in the way he suggests—literally, scientifically? Maybe so, maybe not. Is it true in the way he wants it not to be—poetically, metaphorically? Maybe so, maybe not. As a Christian, I think so. But Zvan differs: “We are better off treating [non-scientific] stories as fantasies until they are supp…
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…d imaginative; females are dependent, supportive, and submissive. Phillips promotes this family vision in the Academy and Festival by encouraging films that endorse it (in 2007 there was even a special category “Biblical Family”). That year, the “Best of Festival” Jubilee Award went to The Monstrous Regiment of Women, a “documentary” directed by Colin Gunn. The film, which has an all-female cast that includes anti-feminist doyenne Phyllis Schlafly…
Read More…n-sponsored Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, perhaps best known for its open letter to Hillary Clinton, days before the 2016 election, challenging the candidate on her support for reproductive health and failure to support religious freedom in the face of “a well-financed war… being waged by the gay and lesbian community”; and William Galston, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Brookings Institution scholar who was a leader…
Read More…rnment is the decentralization of authority into the distinct spheres; the best check on the depravity of human beings in the economy is the decentralization of the market created by competition. But this is nothing like John Calvin’s own thinking. Despite his love of freedom, Calvin also had what we might call “Talibanesque” tendencies, since he believed in the sovereignty of God and the total depravity of humankind; humans are so sinful that eve…
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…don’t knows” or “others,” that gets to about 20% and 40%, respectively, at best. These are not small discrepancies, and based on these falsely inflated statistics, Silverman makes startlingly inaccurate claims, like that there are 80 million atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustr…
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…the line!” But of course I need to look at it through my perspective. The best I can say is I do my best to be mindful of it. I never intend to attack or criticize people. What I always intend to do is expose the shadow side that people are usually not aware of. The type of comedy I enjoy is when the comedian delivers a line in such a way that it makes us become aware of something we previously weren’t aware of. The punch line is delivered and th…
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