Religion Dispatches
…to the ethical. It is all really a matter of science, and we will be much better off when we start to realize this. Most importantly, showing the strong links between the earlier Harris and the later Harris, he insists that religion needs to be removed from the picture. Not only does religion presume to tell people what to do (or not to do), it presumes to tell people the most awful things about what to do (or not to do). Killing, rape, child mol…
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…at the missionary impulse behind their “Christian Americanization” efforts betrayed its own kind of imperialism. Such groups extended the hand of friendship to racialized European immigrants and new Black neighbors from the Great Migration, but nevertheless characterized such groups as practicing “ethnic” religions that could benefit from the civilizing example of White Protestant culture. It was within this patronizing multiculturalism that White…
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…ous or dogmatic reason. His words were valued in the same way as, say, the New Age ‘Law of Attraction’ (formerly known as New Thought): based on their supposedly demonstrable truth, not their religious authority. The devotion of Scientologists to Hubbard may have been weird, slavish, and naïve—but it wasn’t really religious. Or was it? Scientology was intentionally designed to comfort the afflicted, just like religion does. And, just like religion…
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…ligious, according to The Hold Steady; a recent Los Angeles Times article explores how celebrity doctors blur the lines between faith and obsession; and in a recent RD interview, a pilgrimage to the desert can be alive with religious possibilities. The unvarnished truth is that when it comes to religion, the rules of the media game have changed dramatically in the last decade—assuming that there are, in fact, any rules left to change. Up until ver…
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…ding of Trump as a Gentile despot sent to save Israel. The origin of this explanation is often attributed to the xenophobic dominionist Lance Wallnau. This link has been examined from multiple angles by scholars like Sean Durbin, who has noted how this explanation resonates with Christian Zionists’ theological and political agenda to protect the state of Israel at all costs. Damon Berry has shown how this connection emerges in the conservative Chr…
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…within our own borders. We believe, like the Romans, that it’s our job to export our “way of life,” not because we enjoy power, but because we’re “givers” of opportunity. That giving may often involve violence, but it’s only done for the good of those we’re battling, if they only knew it. We too have built massive wealth for a few on the labor of poor and enslaved people. In so many ways—ways that powerful empires always work—we Americans are the…
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…ago when they lacked it.” Ultimately, she believed, the growing antagonism between the sexes “will continue until man grants women equality as a human being.” She also urged men to attend to their wives’ sexual pleasure: “an emotionally mature and loving husband is the best person to help his wife to overcome her frigidity, provided he himself hasn’t caused it by being a clumsy, crude, and uninspiring lover.” None of this had very much to do with…
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…el, AwakenWithJP, where he’s developed a following for his wry send-ups of New Age culture via his alter ego “Ultra Spiritual” JP Sears, a kind of Stephen Colbert for the New Age set. Dressed in a purple T-shirt and pale green headband, with a flower tucked into his chest-length red hair. Ultra Spiritual JP delivers earnest, convoluted advice on everything from vegetarianism to ayahuasca to the psychology of the selfie, all in pitch-perfect deadpa…
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…in August 2011) to repeal the new ordination policies and revert to the discriminatory policies of the past. And here I can only say that those Lutherans considering such a plan of attack might be better served to leave the ELCA and join the new NALC, allowing the ELCA to pursue its mission to manifest God’s grace and Christ’s love in the world, with no exceptions….
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…that faith is more imagined than real. And yet, despite there being some expected variation between Celtic and the rest of Europe’s Christianity, there’s no substantial theological difference between the Roman Catholic Church of the period and its Irish, Scottish, and Welsh believers. Until the Synod of Whitby in 664, the biggest gulf in Christianity between how it was practiced in the Atlantic Archipelago (what most call the British Isles) and i…
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