Religion Dispatches
…ndidates have pledged to be pro-life.” It clicks through to the Personhood USA website. Personhood USA did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Jason Jones, a spokesperson for the Pro-Life Super PAC, claimed the Super PAC was not connected to Personhood USA or any other organization. He said, “we like the [Personhood] pledge. We think it’s a good standard.” The Personhood pledge, which Romney did not sign, commits candidates to su…
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…ch as Wasteland’s authors enjoy painting glimpses of the depopulated New Jerusalem. But in both cases there’s a perverse delight in the overthrow of all that has come before, something of the sentiment of Elvis Costello’s “Waiting For the End of the World”: “Dear Lord I sincerely hope you’re coming / ‘Cause you really started something.” The means by which the better future is wrought mark the key difference between these progressive apocalypse sc…
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…goods. Certainly, media outlets—most notably Breitbart, but also CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—seem to have profited from Trump’s headline-friendly candidacy. But no one else has used it to sell condos, cabins, Hobbit homes, or buckets of freeze-dried food. In this, Bakker represents an illustrative extreme—the reductio ad absurdum of America’s politics-as-entertainment culture, and the extraordinary fulfillment of all the ways that faith, apocalyptic…
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…rom self-destruction, and by the mid-1950s Adamski’s books were selling thousands of copies and inspiring conventions across the world. But as the Cold War heated up, Adamski’s optimism seemed increasingly naïve. In 1952, concerned enough to take this sort of thing seriously, the Air Force began Project Blue Book, an investigation designed to determine whether unidentified flying objects posed a national security threat. Certainly, for the Suttons…
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…polarization. And while Twitter may serve more effectively in broadcasting breaking news, it also tends toward polarization when it comes to politically charged issues. This is especially a problem on the right: research shows that conservatives are more likely to retreat into ideological echo-chambers—a dynamic that Donald Trump has exploited with great success. In other words, at the very moment when digital capitalism is exacerbating class ineq…
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…ing on whether one counts those Jews settled in what was until 1967 Arab Jerusalem.) In the first decades after the June 1967 War, the ideological spearhead of the Jewish settler movement was Gush Emunim (the bloc of the faithful). These settlers were religious Zionists: Modern Orthodox Jews adhering to a worldview that saw Zionism and Judaism as inseparable. They are not the Haredi (“Trembling”) Jews of ultra-Orthodoxy. Ultra-Orthodox life in the…
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…in Laden, crowds almost instantly formed outside the White House chanting “USA! USA!.” Depending on whom you believe, this reaction was either an unsettling display of vengeance directed against a relic of Cold War alliances who no longer had much cachet in most of the Arab world, or it was an understandable existential catharsis; a healthy celebration of patriotism that was more about celebrating “us” rather than denigrating “them.” The day after…
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…Life Church); Jane Lampman’s two September 1999 Christian Science Monitor stories on The World Prayer Center and the ‘spiritual mapping’ movement; and René Holvast’s 2005 dissertation for the University of Utrecht, “Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Paradigm,” which has been reworked into a book published last November. So, our stories connected Palin to a religious movement that relatively few Americans know even ex…
Read More…adical YouTube videos. Without minimizing the hatred and damage that these videos represent, he thinks blaming these videos is an easy answer. The question is what drew them to those YouTube videos in the first place. It’s like when we point to comics, video games, etc. as causes for similar tragedies, like Columbine. In fact, Radon sees Columbine as a much closer parallel. These are two young boys or adults who were outsiders, one may have needed…
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…cultures. Christians and Muslims were trading with each other during the Crusades, and Marco Polo made it to China centuries before Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary. Traders have to know how to temporarily avoid inconvenient subjects long enough to get what they’re looking for. They learn to be careful around the sensitivities of others. Scholars of religion learn to do the same thing. Both, it could be said, are on the lookout for value. Busi…
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