Religion Dispatches
…ns when the openly gay Anglican bishop, Gene Robinson, was confirmed). The code word for most of that uproar is “anti-Modern.” So the irony of Catholic anti-Modernism multiplies, morphs, turns back on itself. The logic of Catholic anti-Modernism, as it were, is capitalist to the core. The Vatican looks at the world map and analyzes new growth markets. When one source of material resources dries up, the empire marches determinedly on. From this per…
Read More…t this President is decidedly not the man to say it. It bears emphasizing that what is not new is the phenomenon of guerrilla warfare, of armed militias not in uniform, inflicting violence against imperial armies and citizens who collaborate with them. That is a very old story. We were already sending US Marines off to fight Barbary pirates (“to the shores of Tripoli,” says the song) in the Napoleonic period. What is new, as noted above, is the te…
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…divorced her to seek a more honest life: “I needed to let the world know that I was an imam, but that I was also gay. Some Muslims may want to live like this still is seventh-century Arabia, but it’s not. If I can’t be part of their Islam, so be it.” Hendricks is also the subject of a story appearing in Quartz this week: “This is who I am and if that means I am going to be killed because of my authenticity, then that is how I choose to meet God,”…
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…litics, or that one term can simply be collapsed into the other; it means that what counts as religion and politics will vary from one time period or culture to another, certainly, but also among diverse groups within a common culture or political state. Analysts decrying “politicized religion” fail to recognize that what one group might view as narrowly political and non-religious (or even irreligious) might well be considered a part of religion…
Read More…a 1998 ban on same-sex marriage, which she defended by saying: “I believe that honoring the family structure is that important” — an emphasis on structure that surely rings true to “pro family” advocates of complementarian marriage roles. How does Palin square these nods to traditionalist family structure with her national aspirations? Through a disclaimer familiar among the women leaders of the antifeminist movement (like Phyllis Schlafy, the gra…
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…int here is not to engage these claims, in large part because we all know that little of what we say is likely to convince anybody of anything they don’t already believe. For professional public intellectuals like Gordis, this is a way to stay in the news. For academics such as myself, it is a way to feel relevant when most days we teach a small cadre of wonderful undergraduate and graduate students and toil away at scholarship that few people wil…
Read More…pinion politely tweaked the president’s tail, and Justice Kennedy fretted that “[a]n anxious world must know that our Government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect.” Justice Sotomayor was more blunt. She referred back to Masterpiece Cakeshop, which the court had handed down just three weeks earlier. Whereas in that case, “a state civil rights commission was found to have acted without ‘the neut…
Read More…ditions change over time. However, to tell people of a different religion that they don’t know what their religious rituals actually mean is ipso facto not a historical argument but a sectarian one. The claim that Christians unknowingly practice a Pagan mystery religion has a long history combining sectarian claims with goofy pseudo-scholarship. It was Protestant Reformers, in fact, who first accused their Catholic rivals of adulterating Christian…
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…ut who in the twenty-first century thinks Catholics “breed like rabbits”? That’s an offensive stereotype of Catholics that went out of date in the 1950s, when most Catholic women got on board with contraception—which the Catholic Church bans. And he made his comments after saying Catholics shouldn’t use birth control and while criticizing a woman who was pregnant for the eighth time and facing a cesarean section: “Does she want to leave the seven…
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…ed foundation has been running these full-pagers everywhere, at God knows what cost, to scare the bejeezus out of us and make us think that unless we slash Social Security and Medicare now, our children and grandchildren will be reduced to foraging nuts and berries in a deficit-cratered landscape. As far as I can tell, Obama is accommodating the scaremongers today mainly because they have the inside muscle to force him to their table. He needs to…
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