Religion Dispatches
…onths on faith is not prudent. He has squandered all the time we give him. Today is prelude to a new tomorrow, not with this administration. Today is always more of the same, days piled on top of days. Shakespeare understood this manic dilemma all too well. Here is Macbeth, another ambitious leader whose overreaching makes him monstrous: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of reco…
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…hms of Egyptian life. We saw this in the protests after the Friday prayers today, in the spontaneous congregational prayers that took place in the heat of demonstrations—and we can see it in the number of Egyptian women who veil (though many don’t and still strongly identify with Islam, whether culturally or religiously, personally or publicly). Egypt’s society is a deeply Muslim one, and the very success of this non-political religious project ha…
Read More…tion to Allah. I also like the way he refers to our Prophet Muhammad. I think, the problem we used to have with being referred to as Mohammedans was only to clarify that we do not worship the Prophet. Because, in a way, what links us to other Muslims today is not just tawhid as much as it is that we follow the way of Muhammad. We are the ummah of Muhammad. According to the Qur’an, he will be a witness for us. And this makes me think, who is this P…
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…ther such biblical warriors as David, Joshua, and Rahab as role models for today’s Christians. Prophet Kris Vallotton of the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry in Redding, California, for example, preached to children about, “Your Identity as Sons of God.” He got them to repeat after him in call and response style: “I am amazing. I am God’s greatest creation… I was born to do greater works than Jesus… and I have the mind of Christ. Therefore I…
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…g the 1912 “Men and Religion Forward” movement—a national revival aimed at promoting the kingdom—Hobson shared the stage of the Brooklyn Tabernacle with Booker T. Washington and claimed that African Americans would degenerate into cannibals if they were permitted to drink alcohol. Christians, he felt, needed to lead the world toward sobriety through law, through example, and through education. Hobson’s take on drugs was quite similar. After Prohib…
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…r she described herself as “white.” Though it makes us squirm in our seats today, clearly whiteness meant something different to her than it does to most of us today. Grappling with that reality is one of the challenges of the book. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? There are hundreds! Let me name two. First’s there’s Jill Lepore’s The Name of War. It’s the book that is the most direct (I hope not derivative) infl…
Read More…tion to Allah. I also like the way he refers to our Prophet Muhammad. I think, the problem we used to have with being referred to as Mohammedans was only to clarify that we do not worship the Prophet. Because, in a way, what links us to other Muslims today is not just tawhid as much as it is that we follow the way of Muhammad. We are the ummah of Muhammad. According to the Qur’an, he will be a witness for us. And this makes me think, who is this P…
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…pioned by portions of the far-right Jewish and Christian Zionist movements today. Hungary: Against “liberal hegemony” Like so many others, Balázs Orbán, political advisor to Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (no relation), as well as the current chairman of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Prime Minister Orbán’s crony factory, draws chuckles from the audience by framing NatCon in Brussels as a heroic resistance operation against…
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…sagree with.” But that wasn’t even the clearest signal the high court gave today that it’s ready to reconsider the weight granted to legal claims of “religious freedom.” In a not-unexpected decision issued today in favor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbus, Missouri, seven justices concluded that a state program that reimbursed organizations which used scrap tire rubber to resurface playgrounds, but denied those grants to religious institutions…
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…nt masculinity to contemporary American evangelical culture, claiming that today’s devout have “replaced the Jesus of the gospels with an idol of machismo …” For some of the authors, the cultural and political commitments of many of today’s evangelicals have become so distasteful to their normative understanding of the faith as to render the term “evangelical” useless. As historian Thomas Kidd puts it in one of his reprinted essays, the invocation…
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