Religion Dispatches
…” Embedded within Maller’s statement may reside the real motivation behind American Jewry’s growing embrace of cremation. Where there is demand, there will be supply. In that peculiarly capitalistic sense, cremation may deserve to be understood the same way we now understand observing the Sabbath and keeping kosher—that is, as one of those aspects of Judaism that modern American Jews feel free to pick and choose from, honoring them in increasingly…
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…pean? Are their “culture and politics” more like white, Christian, Italian-Americans or brown, Muslim, Pakistani-Americans? This isn’t really a question the essay sets out to answer, but it’s revealing, isn’t it? American Islam is tremendously variegated, as indeed is the conservative movement, as the essay itself reveals. But do all American Muslims cluster together, culturally and politically, because they are Muslim? Is their (our/my) Islam mor…
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…about UAPs, yet states that government officials “in the know” will inform Americans of the truth. His statement is either ironic or incoherent. Additionally, posing the question of whether people are, or are not, “ready for the truth” suggests that extraterrestrials are indeed real, but that people just aren’t yet ready to know it. In the contemporary social climate this is exactly how military witness testimonies function—they suggest that the c…
Read More…eporter about homophobic attitudes in Romania and about the role played by American religious conservatives. (The Liberty Counsel took marriage-refusing county clerk Kim Davis on a tour of Romania to drum up support for a referendum putting a marriage ban in the constitution, an effort being promoted by the Orthodox Church.) “It’s the only cause in the world that American money and Russian Money are given for the same cause, which is anti-LGBT pol…
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…nks. You have to determine that on your own.” Haggard’s weekly Oval Office phone calls and grip and grin NAE photo ops with former President George W. Bush are now mere vestiges of an old life, prior to what he calls the “crisis.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggar…
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…And commenter Karen West writes: “Lila has the beauty and brains to do any number of things, but instead, she is laying down her life for those most innocent of all.” But not everyone on the religious right believes that Lila Rose is acting out God’s will, let alone laying down her life. After all, Lila Rose lies in order to get the footage she seeks. She and her colleagues pose as underage pregnant teens, as sex traffickers, as statutory rapists….
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…s inspiration—a Wahhabi version of Islam fomented in the country’s growing number of fundamentalist religious schools—the victims are not necessarily homogenous in their religious beliefs. Attacks in Bangladesh have targeted atheists and apostates, yes, but what victims have generally shared is something more fundamental: a willingness to live according to the dictates of their own consciences, and to pursue an open, pluralistic, and democratic so…
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…all time and space? When the Cubit recently reached out to Dr. Reiss for a phone interview, though, his answers were surprising. We discussed his methodology, potential applications of his theory to secularism, and Reiss’s own spirituality as a scientist. How does your theory differ from those of past authors that posit just one or two motivations for religion? Ours is based on scientific research, so we ask people what motivates them. At this poi…
Read More…responses to the planned Qur’an burning in Afghanistan to the responses of American Christians to desecration of their sacred symbols, completely ignoring the distinctly different political contexts. Another identified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its l…
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…courts for more than a decade. We used the internet to regroup and grow in numbers. The Church even developed its own web-based resources to acknowledge and address its own controversies—historic and contemporary. This, we thought, was a good sign. A sign that might not need to fear losing our membership, our place, in a cherished tradition, just for having and voicing questions, doubts, and differences. We told ourselves to not to be afraid. And…
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