Religion Dispatches
…ether in terms of kindness, or humility, or following their dreams, or any number of other positive values—just as it’s at its worst when it takes agency away. The particular myths that Tebow or Lin happen to believe in are secondary (and of course, I mean ‘myths’ in the sophisticated sense of stories that give meaning to human life, not false tales). What’s primary is that they believe, despite ample reasons not to do so, in the possibility of hu…
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…just wrapped up its first season. Over twelve episodes Serial untangles the 1999 murder trial of Adnan Syed, a 17-year-old Baltimore Muslim who was accused of killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Serial probes pre-9/11 American attitudes towards Islam, which played a significant role in Adnan’s unjust imprisonment. We at RD became obsessed with the podcast, and even live-tweeted the finale. If you haven’t listened to it, go do it now. I’m not go…
Read More…, the most significant of which are the Church of England Empowering Act of 1928, and Te Pouhere , the Constitution of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, which came into force in 1992. The working group report acknowledges that the group’s believe “that the proposed liturgies do not represent a departure from the Doctrine and Sacraments of Christ” will be controversial, “a crucial matter for debate.” Italy: Senate Passes C…
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…rian, anti-capitalist understandings of emancipation that had flourished in 1960s and 1970s spiritual movements. Consider the political dissenter Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World and what it represented to many participants in the 1960s British-American counterculture whose countless spiritualities subverted the social status quo through bodily and community actions. As rain poured down on Trump’s inauguration, I looked at my like-m…
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…hite evangelicals; the Utah College Exit Poll, however, with a much higher number of Mormon participants, put the number closer to 45 percent. Both figures are well below previous Mormon voting percentages for the Republican candidates, but they indicate that at least half of Latter-day Saints were willing to stomach Trump’s apparent moral deficiencies. This turn of events has historical precedent. Though the LDS Church’s political affiliation was…
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…essor, not buying it,” suggesting that expertise is really just opinion. A number of thoughtful evangelicals are alarmed at the surging anti-intellectualism within their ranks. And there are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists, and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields. Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they do not speak the language o…
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…st likely to indicate outright refusal to take a Covid-19 vaccine, while a number of other studies have also found that number hovering close to 25 percent. Journalists and academics alike have attempted to make sense of this discrepancy, pointing to existential fear, anti-intellectualism, and Christian nationalism as potential influences on American evangelicals’ vaccine antipathy. As a scholar of American evangelicalism and media, I am inclined…
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…ually informed that the Post’s editor, Michelle Vu, who authored the August 17 response, had “politely decline[d]” my request. Instead, I was provided with a brief statement: “Christianity Today wrote an article that implicated the Christian Post. CP responded with our own fact-finding article about the sources used. CP had already told CT and sent documents to the publication regarding the questionable integrity of its sources. Nothing should co…
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…ey and Jan Schakowsky. The doctor said she is worried about the increasing number of restrictions on abortion states are implementing. (To get a sense how women’s access to abortion is shrinking across the country, take a look at this map assembled by the Guttmacher Institute.) Twenty-four hour waiting periods, for example, can cause a woman to miss the one day a week a clinic performs abortions, pushing the procedure off another week and making i…
Read MoreThe most dispiriting number to come out of North Carolina today was the huge margin of victory for a constitutional amendment that, as Candace has noted, will not only forbid same-sex couples from getting married, but will strip couples of any legal protections that might have been offered through domestic partnerships or civil unions. The broad wording of the amendment is more evidence that anti-gay advocates are lying when they say they’re only…
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