Religion Dispatches
…Song, and it deals with all the data amassed by the survey that I couldn’t use in Then Sings My Soul—over 700 fans and professionals responded, generating more than 3,000 separate prose-based responses to various prompts. The Gospel Sensibility is grounded in listening to and analyzing the voices of Southern gospel music. In the process, the book aims to provide the first sustained critical account of how people collectively and individually use S…
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…, that some rice “landraces have identifiable socio-cultural and religious use values i.e., landraces used in make special dishes for offering to deities,” while modern varieties, the only kind promoted by the government, “are considered ‘impure’ for socio-cultural and religious ceremonies.” Faced with a soaring rate of Diabetes caused by the abandonment of traditional foods for “white” food products, the Tohono O’odham of the Sonora Desert have o…
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…nd rigor of a formal social science study. That doesn’t make these reports useless. Pew is performing a kind of large-scale journalism. But, because it involves numbers and stats, journalists generally treat polls as if they’re hard science, establishing basic facts about the American public, rather than with the kind of cautious skepticism that, in theory, journalists should bring to any story. Anyway, it’s boring; who wants to wade through all t…
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…didn’t know those terms. Yet scholars seem to be more rigid about similar uses of language related to sex. I would also make use of recent literature on aspiring saints and feigned sanctity, clarifying what seems to be less than obvious, that religion and sexuality are not either/or categories, but both/and. I have seen your book in quite surprising places: in women’s bookstores and big chain stores, on syllabi in religious studies, history, and…
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…go through multiple layers of approval, to the point where you can’t even use the word LGBT. They’ll use something like “Spectrum” or “Welcome Ministry.” It has to be so coded that it doesn’t ruffle any feathers, and that’s not the case for women. And that’s very sad. To me, LGBT people are sometimes treated like lepers. One of the things I’ve learned in this informal ministry is the unbelievable things priests, sisters, brothers and lay associat…
Read More…s performing what comedy. Another is that the term Mormon has already been used to promote professional endeavors. In the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, a race car driver from Utah named Ab Jenkins set records for speed racing in vehicles he called the “Mormon Meteor.” No one suggested that he was claiming that his car was endorsed by the LDS establishment. Finally, officially registered trademarks can and do become so genericised that the original holder…
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…eople have written to me to tell me that they would like to burn down my house, because of my championing of religion); and I have had a lot of abuse from people because I write positively about Islam; some Christians in Holland objected vociferously when I was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal; Catholics in the UK have hated my work. But I am writing about contentious issues that arouse a good deal of passion. If I did not att…
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…victed for doing his job.” He has, moreover, encouraged police officers to use violence on suspects. “Why show restraint?” the American president repeatedly asked police officers in Long Island, equating roughing up of suspects with the enforcement of law. And it is an equation: for Trump, as for Arpaio, unchecked power—the violence of the state, aimed at citizens, at journalists, or at “illegals”—is not merely a prerogative, it is a good. This is…
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…h advisers, Palin was simply unaware of the history of “blood libels,” and used it out of ignorance. If she did use the term deliberately, with full knowledge of its connotations, I tremble at the political fabric she is manufacturing. Either way, Ms. Palin may have just garnered a spot in the Jewish history textbooks. Invoking “blood libel” in an utterly inappropriate context, she will be remembered for her manipulative use of one of the ugliest…
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…in the Orthodox world, ordaining women remains a radical move; perhaps because Orthodoxy is a culture in which men and women assume divergent gender roles in largely separate social spheres. The mainstream Orthodox viewpoint holds that God created men and women to be different according to divine purpose. (For an insider’s perspective on this, try the anthology Bread and Fire [Urim, 2008], edited by Rivkah Slonim.) Within that paradigm, for a woma…
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