Religion Dispatches
…mselves] at the new moon, bathing in the river, and invoking the heavens.” Today, scholars such as Harvard’s Kimberley C. Patton provide theologically informed readings of many traditional claims about the religious awareness of other beings. Patton deals, for example, with “ways in which animals are believed to possess a unique awareness of holiness,” noting that “in many religious worlds…mutual intelligibility obtains between God and animals tha…
Read More…lorification of man on the mind. Christopher Lasch’s question is as urgent today as it was when he posed it 18 years ago in his book The True and Only Heaven How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once in for all? Reitan raises in separate chapters the key arguments that atheists have used or attacked, including theories of…
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…age crafted outside the immediate experience of the audience, social media today is by its nature participatory, interactive, collaborative, distributive, and, importantly, integrated deeply into the day-to-day experience of users. Updating a Facebook status or tweeting a question about the nature of the Trinity (it happens!) is not a break in the action, an interruption of demands of daily life. These activities are intimate parts of contemporary…
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…ening the hand of the poor and needy” is regarded as socialist anathema by today’s Tea Party zealots, the Tea Party has more in common with the Sodomites than do gays or lesbians. Likewise in text after text after text, Sodom’s wickedness is connected to cruelty, injustice, and deceit—never homosexuality. Jeremiah 23:14: I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem a horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the…
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…ate–side as Arkansas governor that drew the ire of the state’s hard-right. Today, in the culmination of the last eight years of his rebranding to the right, Huckabee played down any pastoral political persona in favor of an angry ideologue who thinks the government is a tyrannical overlord bent on “criminalizing Christianity:” [W]e’ve lost our way morally. We have witnessed the slaughter of over 55 million babies in the name of choice, and are now…
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…societal and cultural reckoning, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was a large public vigil in Berlin to protest anti-Semitism. Among the attendees were German President Joachim Guack, members of Germany’s parliament, leaders of both of t…
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…ss of pretense. Our old friend self-deception But the hypocrisy we witness today may not be so much acts of pretense and public false performance as self-deception. In Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations, Béla Szabados and Eldon Soifer suggest that our perception of hypocrisy has shifted in modern times. If Biblical and Medieval thinkers saw hypocrisy primarily as a matter of pretense, of the difference between the inner morality and outward perform…
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…ome specifics about Islam in those parts of the world germane to our lives today. American attitudes towards Iran and Iraq, not to mention our foreign policy choices, would be much more sound if we spent some time learning how to distinguish between Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufi Islam, and about which political movements in Iran and Iraq believe Muslim clerics should run the government versus those that do not. If we had understood those distinctions in…
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…, without the pressures of the kind of faceless international trade we see today. Today consumers face a more insidious question: What if the very morality of such a “local” act is being marketed in its own right? What if we are told in advertising campaigns that it’s about participating in a “local” culture which is “authentically” ours, when that culture is neither local nor authentic? The problem for global consumers today is that all marketpla…
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…stion for the United States than race. This was wrong in 2007. It is wrong today. Not only does it understate the challenge of the color line. It also overstates the role of faith. Yes, religious ideas are involved in conflict. But they rarely appear alone. The two most virulent forms of religious prejudice in America today—Islamophobia and anti-Semitism—are largely about xenophobia and the construction of Islam and Judaism as racial categories. A…
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