Religion Dispatches
…s author: HOW I SURVIVED IT HOW WE CAN END IT That survivor, of course, is Aayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who fled to Holland, before landing in the United States. Her husband is the British historian Niall Ferguson (an Oxford-Harvard professor of empire). There are many differences between the two articles and between the two authors. Ghosh is a professional journalist with a commitment to neutral reportage, while Ali is a professiona…
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…white space. Short sentences that force you to stop. And think. And start again. What would Rob Bell do to fill up eight hours in person? The message of the book is simple: look around at your life, decide if it’s what you want, then devote all your energy to living the best life you can. Don’t stop yourself from doing something you want to do. Just do it. Even if that thing is being an assistant regional manager of an insurance company—he actual…
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…t studying religion. Early on, he made his reputation with works on Kierkegaard and Hegel, and during the 1980s he helped to bring the ideas of Jacques Derrida into American theology and religious studies. Starting in the late 90s, though, Taylor ventured far afield with books on architecture, computer networks, economic markets, and even Las Vegas. In 2006, he released a book of photographs of animal skeletons in the desert. Taylor’s most recent…
Read More…can we even respond to such misinformation? What could I possibly say to balance its unfairness? Then I realized that we should never argue on these terms—the deck is stacked against us. One way to push back is to highlight a very different kind of Muslim world, the real, dynamic, flexible Muslim world, which is part of the wider world, not angry but eager, not oppositional but contributory. So I picked two news stories that should bring a smile…
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…hat, according to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the lousy choices available to us on election day are all our fault. And you’ll never guess why: because we didn’t have enough babies to keep men from feeling sad and lonely. Yup, both Hillary Clinton and the entire Trump phenomenon (the specter of an actual demagogue taking the reins of the most powerful nation on earth, finger on the nukes) are due to the decline in childbearing, says Dout…
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…all the way up until Rousseau. It’s only with Rousseau that you get an explanation for lying and the fall of mankind that has nothing to do with a religious story. Even then, the question’s urgency still seems to have theological roots. Clearly [Rousseau] thinks that the story he has to tell is how lying somehow deformed humanity. Even someone like Kant says we should never lie, and every lie is like a refutation of human nature. That kind of stro…
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…total sobriety is required. Eight weeks into a public health and economic catastrophe, the facts before us should be sobering enough: Disease and death in this pandemic overwhelmingly afflict communities of color (e.g. despite making up just a third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbers are 14% and 40% respectively, etc). The crisis has already condemned low-income families to a…
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…this weird little booklet that looked like it had been mimeographed. In a garage. Poorly. Every single sentence ended with an exclamation point (for some reason, I was okay with that). My brother Jerry and I spent a summer month following its grueling instructions on how to add a whole inch to our biceps, which basically involved curling dumbbells every other hour all day long until we turned blue and couldn’t lift our arms any longer. It was awes…
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…e governor might appreciate the observations of our second president, John Adams. Hearing this, a disciple of Mr. Barton might nod approvingly, and point out that Gov. Perry is indeed following the example of President Adams by calling for a national time of fasting and prayer, events President Adams endorsed in 1798 and 1799. While it is true that Adams declared these national fasts, he later regretted it, telling good friend, Benjamin Rush, “The…
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…kably simple affairs. But our ceremonies retain their own majesty and are capable of projecting a strong sense that something sacred is happening. Our inaugurations have always reflected a mashup of civil religion—invocations of our secular sacred texts, appeals to mystic chords of national memory—and bits of naked Christian expression. Fully secular democracies rightly dispense with things like invocations and benedictions; no hands are placed on…
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