Offers 1 800-299-7264 Cheap Flights to Key West – American Airlines | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

A Religious History of American Neuroscience

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…an Christians and turned instead to homegrown practitioners of various mind-over-matter cures. He particularly accented those New Thought metaphysicians who were pushing forward a dialogue with far-flung emissaries of yoga and Buddhist meditation in the wake of the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893. Among James’ favored practitioners of these newly improvised regimens of meditation was Ralph Waldo Trine, a Boston-based refor…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…the United States the vast majority of our medical resources go towards end-of-life care, using medicine, the law, philosophy, ethics, and religion as lenses through which she helps her reader understand difficult questions about what death is, how death should happen, and how death shouldn’t. The Good Death has as a central sentiment that “Because of medical developments, we’ve gotten away from caring for our dying, from seeing death up close… [s…

‘Only Christopher They Acknowledge is Columbus’: The ‘Biblical’ Reason why Replacing Columbus Day is an Uphill Battle

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…arriving immigrants, Columbus Day has its roots in San Francisco’s Italian-American community in which Columbus Day coincided with the celebration of Italian-American heritage. But why Columbus? Were there not innumerable Italian Americans who would be more fitting (and less problematic) to symbolize Italian-American contributions to American society than an individual who never actually set foot in what is now the United States? Whether it’s the…

Leave Your Stereotypes at the Door: 10Q on “Keeping it Halal”

By John O'Brien

…spent over a year hanging out and talking to people at a social club for Westerners and conducted interviews of mostly white British and American expatriates. Central themes emerging in this project so far include how white migrants from Europe and America construct and maintain a pan-Western white identity within a highly multicultural Arab society, as well as how expats coming from Western liberal democracies adjust their everyday practices and…

Overnight Sensation ‘The Rich Men North of Richmond’ isn’t Just a Window into a Forgotten America — It’s an Invitation into a Worldview

By Bradley Onishi

…ny decries the “300 pound” people living on welfare. Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds It’s hard not to read “welfare” as code. Welfare has long been used in conservative circles as a dog whistle for Black people, immigrants, and others who are supposedly too lazy to work and thus draining the life from our society. The idea of the “welfare queen,” a single Black urban mother,…

Conservatives Accuse Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of Misconduct

By Elizabeth Drescher

…and theological subterfuge. The group is a strategic reincarnation of the American Anglican Council of Washington, a chapter of the American Anglican Council (AAC), the national body created in 1996 to oversee congregations that split with the Episcopal Church. As an organization independent of the Episcopal church, the AAC and its affiliates would have not have standing in the church to bring disciplinary charges. Trustees of the AFF have been a…

Prison as Resurrection

By Caleb Smith

…izing redemption that his boss offers him, even though his refusal leaves him abandoned to a fate of ghostly inhumanity. He dies in a New York prison called The Tombs. What’s your next book? I’m working on something called The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice, 1765-1865. It’s about how judges and offenders alike appealed to a higher law—divine, natural, or national—in the postrevolutionary age of print media, secularity, and popular sove…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…mes to arguments about women’s reproductive rights, this resurgence of anti-feminism in public discourse? My Ph.D. is in American Religious History, so my default move, when it seems like everything around me is dark or failing, is to look back to the past and ask, ‘What did those people do who came before us?’ There’s a reason for the phrase, ‘It’s darkest before the dawn.’ So often in American history the greatest movements toward social justice…

Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…oni Morrison and Cornel West, to this august list of American spiritualists-in-letters—was ultimately a psalmist of the human spirit. He was, as we would now say, “spiritual (or sacred), not religious.” But then, in his judgment, that’s what democracy is all about. The very coin of the democratic realm is “sacred.” Whitman saw the work of fostering such a “religious democracy” as the work of the 20th century, and that task continues unabated toda…

Dangerous Religion

By Gary Laderman

…originating from the blogosphere and mainstream media about Muslims. Muslim-Americans who worked and died in the World Trade Center, who are pillars of their local communities, who participate in significant interfaith efforts—all of these religious human beings are utterly and completely disregarded in the vile rhetoric spewing from those who oppose ensuring Muslims have the same rights as other Americans. Even white Protestant Americans who belo…