Religion Dispatches
There have times during the last year when the most important political figure in the United States seemed not to be Barack Obama, but Abraham Lincoln. In his deft review of a number of new books on Lincoln (all released to coincide with the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth), Ari Kelman observes that the 2008 election seemed at times to be a referendum on who could claim the mantle of the sixteenth president. Obama shrewdly promoted this storyline…
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…But political discourse is not merely a weapon to gain power, either. It’s most fruitful to see political talk, and much political action, as a way of creating and reinforcing dramatic narratives (some would call them myths). When I applied this hypothesis to the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” I found lots of evidence that this concept is a gripping story because it is built on a relatively simple, age-old story: a moral drama of absolute…
Read More…record of making homophobic and anti-Muslim comments to one of the world’s most prestigious universities makes little sense. And, in the event that MIT was having trouble finding a conservative economist who hasn’t disparaged marginalized communities, perhaps it ought to think more deeply about that. In the end, the value of holding the India symposium at MIT will likely be drowned out by the presence of someone who should have never been invited…
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…rch’s sale of indulgences. Halloween is a little troublesome to me as well—mostly because it’s just gotten so commercial. I like it as more of a handcrafted, neighborhoody children’s frolic, rather than an excuse to litter yards with icky vinyl inflatables and for adults to wear embarrassing, shoddy costumes. My aesthetic objections are not on a par with those who find the holiday objectionable on soul-threatening grounds, but still. I kinda get i…
Read More…s as well, according to Hesiod, though later authors would disagree with almo*]}*st every aspect of these divine genealogies). The youngest of the sons of Earth and Sky was also the most rebellious: this was Cronus. And so begins a story that recurs throughout the early portions of the Theogony: a father is jealous of his offspring and tries to erase them; the sons supplant the father and take his place. In this case, Sky has taken to burying each of…
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…oppose her in the runup to 2020. And while the senator from Massachusetts still insists she does not have her sights on the presidency, she is on the interview circuit talking about the subject of newest book, This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class, with what we might well call “evangelical” zeal. Hence this reflection, from Peter Laarman, on the many uses of the term. –The Eds. In our ongoing conversations these days…
Read More…es of America. It has also stained our national honor. In that regard, the most important lines of President Bush’s farewell address were these: As we address these challenges – and others we cannot foresee tonight – America must maintain our moral clarity. I have often spoken to you about good and evil. This has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise. Murdering the inno…
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…of equal standing for such persons is itself quite telling. To my eye, the most significant thing that has happened between 1979 and 2012 has been the significant and at times studied erosion of feminist achievements in mandatory, state-sanctioned equality. I’m talking about the basics here, the principal First and Second Wave achievements: political equality, symbolized by a woman’s right to vote and to hold political office; and economic equalit…
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…ultiplied in the days after his demise, one thing that struck me was the almo*]}*st telephoto-focus on a single novel, his 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye. And the most important thing to observe about The Catcher in the Rye, is that it is the only non-explicitly religious book Salinger, a restless religious seeker, ever wrote. There is no question but that this book has become an almo*]}*st inescapable part of the implicit New American canon; scarce…
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…f just how irrelevant the Almighty is to religious life. Some of the greatest moral leaders of our day recognize this new spiritual reality. In a poetic and prophetic opinion piece in the New York Times this weekend, Bono asked “Do you know where your soul is?” Soul Music On the one hand, Bono is not a religious leader, just an entertainer with the celebrity cachet to transform rock fame into political muscle. Yet he is not simply a superstar, and…
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