Religion Dispatches
…spiritual practices play an increasingly important role in the lives of American seekers and believers, and ministers seeking relevance are wise to link traditional religious practices to the activities of daily life. But where blessing mobile phones, family pets, bicycles, and so on gets it wrong is in failing to invite the spiritual experience and creativity of believers back into the formal faith setting. Believers in the Digital Reformation ar…
Read More
…as drunk, which was the only way she could handle getting up behind a microphone. God was barely mentioned. When asked about the secular nature of the vigil and why he agreed to participate, Rios responded that “it is always the responsibility of clergy to act in moments of disaster, regardless of the secular tone and style.” Throughout the vigil, he said, “[I] kept thinking of Jesus and where this radical Rabbi was in moments of disaster. I kept…
Read More
…s a dean and a professor of history at the University of Chicago. Over the phone, he spoke with RD about Twitter, Trump, and the parallels between anti-Judaism and misogyny. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. When you see American Jews acting surprised about the recent surge in anti-Jewish rhetoric, do you think “Oh, how hopelessly short-sighted of them”? Quite the contrary. I am myself surprised. I’ve had discussions with peop…
Read More…te the same thing today. Since that piece was published in 2002, in the American church, some of those measures were taken, and although there are many cases that still need adjudication or resolution, the path to rectify the sexual abuse has, and continues to be addressed. As Thomas Reese, S. J notes, it took seventeen years for the American church to address the sexual abuse scandal properly. I recommend his article for its judiciousness in expl…
Read More…essor went a step beyond outrage. She called upon the international and American community—via her undergraduates, if you please—to save Muslim women in the Middle East. America, she entreated, should penalize Middle Eastern nations. Any country that disadvantaged women to the extent that they could not easily pursue careers, and where they were married under family arrangements instead of purely personal choice, should not receive US aid. Heck, u…
Read More
…e American past and present. He saw the Jefferson Bible as an important American historical object. It wasn’t just something left behind by a Founding Father, it was an object with a particular resonance. It seems so obviously an object that reinforces Jefferson’s deism, and yet some insist it is evidence of his orthodox faith. Christian nationalists cannot accept that Jefferson’s religious ideas don’t match their own. They claim that Jefferson wa…
Read More
…surgery can make the patient’s arm pop up like an eager student’s by electrically stimulating the motor cortex. The patient often insists that she meant to move the arm and even invents a reason why: She was waving to that nurse walking by the door! Neurologists call these erroneous, post-hoc explanations confabulations. Some scientists argue that whenever we explain our acts as the outcome of our conscious choice, we are engaging in a kind of co…
Read More
…yn Cook’s premise in The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. Through carefully researched individual narratives, Cook tells the story of people who got into QAnon and then rejected—or were rejected by—family members, and the grief and damage that ensues from these domestic ruptures. The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family Jesselyn Cook Crown July 23, 2024 It’s hard going to read compounding ta…
Read More
…interesting about Hopkinsville is not that it was unique, but the ways Americans in general, and the residents of Hopkinsville in particular, made the incident an expression of their anxieties. The eight years between Billy Ray Taylor’s sprint back to the Sutton’s farmhouse and 1947’s widely reported crash of a mysterious object outside Roswell, New Mexico, was full of sightings of odd flying objects and occasionally of their pilots. Reflecting t…
Read More
…re attempting to kill herself. Christensen claimed she was responding to a phone call from her husband, a pastor, who announced that the world was ending and to get the family ready. Cases such as this raise questions that have long gone unanswered about how the state should define “religion.” By what criteria should we decide whether deviant beliefs and actions are an expression of religion or evidence of a medical problem? Dr. Kolchak points out…
Read More