Religion Dispatches
…otections, they certainly weren’t lobbying for religion to be removed as a class currently protected by hate crimes laws. You can bet that if anyone yelled anti-Christian slurs while assaulting or killing someone the religious right would be screaming for the maximum penalty available under their “special right” to hate crime protection. What puzzles me the most in all of this is the religious right’s insistence that they have some inalienable rig…
Read More…siness conservatives and neocons, but, it turns out, not the white working class voters who are supporting Trump. It seems that if you don’t have a job and are watching your community crumble around you from years of economic stagnation, “defending religious freedom” or “rebuilding our marriage culture” as defined by the Catholic right are of little concern. And while George and Weigel give lip service to “wage stagnation,” it’s still wrapped up w…
Read More
…In other words, at the very moment when digital capitalism is exacerbating class inequality, social media is catalyzing attitudes of racism, sexism, and nativism among those who fear losing the socio-economic privilege they once enjoyed. In Trump, it’s as if old man Krapp has found his political savior. But a nation of networked Krapps is one with a future unmoored. Fortunately, social media has served as a platform for activists to demand some se…
Read More
…Catholic Thought, a collaboration of clergy and laity, has sponsored these classes for years. Classes offered at the university have existed alongside much more didactic classes in Catholic theology held at the Institute in the basement of the St. John’s Newman Center residence halls right on campus. In some respects, of course, this agreement to offer theology courses in a public university may be controversial. However, it was never funded from…
Read More
…d on which candidate presented themselves as most in touch with the middle class, few questioned the very idea of a middle; a class that, by definition, assumes the continued existence of the lower class. The Nation of Islam speaks to those sensitive to that void, whether or not those listeners buy into Nation theology and tactics. Lawrence Mamiya, a professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Vassar College, contends that while the Nation suppo…
Read More…sexuals will become part of an elite class’ and ‘Christians will be second-class citizens at best.’” The most powerful person in Texas and a contender to be the most powerful person in the world is hosting a Christians-only prayer rally with an organization that believes Christians are at serious risk of becoming “second-class citizens.” What’s important to remember, though, is that while religious right elites are lining up to endorse Perry’s pra…
Read More…e on the story here. It’s difficult to tell exactly what took place in the classroom and whether Hensley overstepped her boundaries in a discussion of religion. Nonetheless, this all leads me to wonder, if a student argues in class that the bible is life’s literal blueprint, facts be damned, is it wrong for a teacher, in the course of teaching science, to correct the student’s misinformed worldview? Or, in the interest of not offending the child a…
Read More
…ave you. Since I try to introduce an historical perspective in most of my classes, I find myself speaking of decades, and centuries, and millennia, almost as a matter of natural course. And for some reason, I have found it very difficult to stop speaking as if we lived still in the twentieth century. Describing the passage of time in one’s own lifetime a decade at a time requires some creativity and thoughtfulness; marking the appearance of a new…
Read More
…arians how to do so. I liked God in America and will use portions of it in class for years to come. [Full disclosure: I was interviewed a few times by the show’s producers—once in person and several times by phone—and gave them some advice on what kinds of material I would like to see included.] But I do want to ask what this series would look like if we also understand American religious history to be about coercion and authority? Most of God in…
Read More
…e. As he told it, one day Frank and a partner “did statistics on Christian numbers” and decided that it was a huge market to tap into. According to Frank, in their first year alone (2008), they did over $250,000 in sales, and the J.D.T. line is only growing. In February the New York Times published R.M. Schneiderman’s article “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries” about the “growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed m…
Read More