Religion Dispatches
…t cast his lot with the Nazis, submitting rather cravenly to some of their most egregious anti-Semitic rhetoric. In this way, Schmitt drowned out his own most important arguments in a cacophony of ethnocentric hate speech. It is a shame, because his political arguments are worth hearing and they are, in Agamben’s view, altogether premonitory. Schmitt came of age in the pre- and post-World War One era of global crisis. It was precisely that sense o…
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…had the necessary combination of time and education, Keats argues, but now most people in the modern world have a modicum of both. Yet Keats, 39 years old, feels there is a complete lack of curiosity on the part of the average person to ask the playful and profound questions at the heart of human existence. Scientists have specialized themselves into corners, the “sad consequence of the happy pursuit of knowledge.” The hoi polloi wait, Keats lamen…
Read More…nt as just that—one incident, informed only by the details of grand jury testimony. In my experience—and I would imagine, that of many others—the perspective one adopts on this question usually aligns with her political position, which in turn informs her religiosity. And as with many other issues of partisan import, this one asks people to make a judgment about the nature of governmental power. Listening to conservative Christian friends defend D…
Read More…s beliefs. And it is the apparent net of beliefs that may well lie behind Steven Waldman’s decision to ignore all of this that is most disturbing about his remarks….
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…committee, whose members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and are mostly comprised of persons who previously served in that body. The political leanings of many of their award decisions concerning Literature and Peace are not hard to see. But Limbaugh goes a step further. He claims to know precisely what political message was intended. It is, he argues, an anti-surge-in-Afghanistan award.. Maybe. I’m less certain of how to read this decis…
Read More…a little different from where I sit at the southwestern tip of the Book-of-Mormon-belt than they do from Professor Ruprecht’s vantage point in Atlanta, Georgia. To this religion scholar and contemporary cultural critic it seems pretty clear that: A) the Tea Party movement is not monolithic but rather deeply inflected with and informed by local and regional histories, concerns, rhetorics, and cultural nuances; and B) among its LDS supporters in t…
Read More…ple long since thought to have been dead and passed from the scene: dead, (mostly) white, mainstream/liberal/mainline/ecumenical Protestants. In assessing the roots of a surge of work on 20th-century liberal Protestantism, including works such as Matt Hedstrom’s The Rise of Liberal Religion, Jill Gill’s Embattled Ecumenism, David Burns’ The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus, and Elesha Coffman’s The Christian Century and the Rise of…
Read More…question, a certain amount of historical situating is in order. One of the most influential, if not the most influential, Opening Ceremonies in the Modern period (at least since the 1936 Berlin Olympics and its extraordinary innovation, the creation of the Olympic Torch and Relay), were those of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The Koreans devoted six full years to their planning and choreography, and hired a veritable army of several hundred artists in t…
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…ile still a cardinal, he co-authored a book with a rabbi, and he has spent most of his career in multiethnic Argentina. Still, as he embarks on his papacy, Francis would do well to remember that learning more about a religion is not always the key to getting along with those who practice it. As the Parisians of 1240 remind us, intellectual examination can actually interfere with the daily realities of religious coexistence. Above all, religious gr…
Read More…flects on the meaning of the past year, by highlighting what he recalls as most significant in it. The Pope’s reflections on this occasion were reproduced in L’Osservatore Romano in the last edition of the year. Pope Benedict XVI began with the liturgical formula, Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni (“Raise up your power, oh God, and come”). He speculated that this liturgical formula was probably a product of the declining years of the Roman E…
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