Religion Dispatches
…Take Ataturk, father of an ostensibly Central Asian nation; he was born in today’s Macedonia, his features strikingly and suspiciously Slavic—blond hair and blue eyes. The 1990s war awakened many of these connections, and as Turkey in many respects challenges Ataturk’s legacy (especially his late 19th-century romantic European nationalism), the older truths of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage gain visibility. Not to resurrect empire, but to rediscover th…
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…ycoons—the Ones with the Diamond Stickpins Let me say a bit more about why today’s smooth operators are more loathsome than the tycoons of old. T.J. Stiles’ prizewinning new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt shows the old reprobate to have been driven, ruthless, and sometimes brutal in pursuit of what he wanted. But always mindful of time and chance and never pretending to be of a superior species than the people he outwitted and exploited. It is…
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…in America has improved considerably since Tharpe’s and Cleveland’s time, today the resistance within evangelical popular culture toward non-heterosexuals may be, if anything, intensifying in far more overt and punishing ways than in times past. While Cleveland dominated gospel music for two generations despite the open secret of his homosexuality, the only performers today who have been as widely known to be gay, while also maintaining a career…
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…d only truly became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and is known today as one of the most influential Catholic theologians with regards to evolution in the second half of the 20thcentury. To chart this influence, one need only note Teilhard’s citations by the three most recent Popes. In 2003, Pope Saint John Paul II echoed Teilhard’s vision of a cosmic Eucharist in the encyclical Ecclesia Eucharista: Because even when it is celebrated on…
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…the Bible). This approach to race is known as two-seed theory, and it was promoted by none other than William Branham, the Latter Rain leader. In fact, Branham was ordained into ministry by Roy Davis, the National Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Today’s NAR leaders seem untroubled by Branham’s associations with White supremacism and laud him as an early prophet of their movement. One former elder at Bethel Church, a NAR powerhouse in Redding…
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…wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance of the far right in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet ironically, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed” now rules the state of Israel. Hartman may not be able to change that reality, so he wants to change the story. Is it possible, today, for one to not be a Zionist and still be p…
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…(second) generation attitude toward science and religion. The Battle Lines Today So much for intergenerational histories in the abstract; the juicy stuff always lies in the details. When we survey the opposing armies, what do we see? The forces of science: Those who start from the standpoint of science fall into three main groups: the New Atheists, who argue that the mere existence of religion is a threat to science and weakens it; the “privately…
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…e people are nonbelievers. But most of them probably are. According to USA Today, this group—the unaffiliated—represent one of the “fastest-growing segments of the population.” Their percentage of the electorate has already grown from 9% in 2000 to 12% this year. It may even be that the category of unaffiliated underestimates the voting power of nonbelievers. The same Pew Forum study also reported on another question in national exit polling—how o…
Read More…us confess we are addicted to fossil fuels and will use some to go to work today or to cook our food today or to warm our homes today, it is a good day to pray. Like that drink you can’t stop drinking, we are stuck in an addictive pattern. We are morally compromised, to put it mildly. Yesterday it looked like 1.5° C (about 3°F) was going to be the direction for COP21’s final objective (“1.5 and stay alive,” goes the slogan) or at the very least “l…
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…but what we have here, mostly, is a particular aesthetic (“The TED talk is today a sentimental form,” Nathan Heller writes in The New Yorker). Wright describes this aesthetic in frankly spiritual terms. TED talks, he told me, are in keeping with “a kind of civic religion of aspiration and self-reliance and communal progress.” When I brought up this hope-and-progress energy with Vanderbilt historian Paul Stob, a scholar of intellectual culture, he…
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