Religion Dispatches
…heoretical enforcer of a normative and unchallenged liberal Protestant and Western religious modernity; to put this less theoretically, the academic study of religion […] has long reinforced and given ‘scientific’ sanction to common social prejudices. Orsi warns that the Christian project Turner describes is alive and well in the field. James to the Rescue At the end of Turner’s book, however, a hero emerges to wrestle religious studies from its r…
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…ans in Kadugli have been getting out to church and human rights groups and Western news media since the Sudan Armed Forces initiated attacks in South Kordofan in early June. Since then, tens of thousands have fled. According to refugee accounts that surfaced in the international media, SAF helicopter gunships have hunted them in the mountains, and bombers have unleashed terror on towns. And although news media are barred from the area, and the UN…
Read More…gh, is reassuringly undistinguished. There are lots of Bosnians, white and Western enough to pass for everyday Americans, though the occasional hijabs might throw you off. There are a few Americans, who seem to be intrepid backpackers. And I can’t figure out what the many Gulf Arabs are here for. (The Americans seated next to them seem just as perplexed, but additionally faintly alarmed.) Some of the Arabs are young, wide fellows with mighty beard…
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…again. The Prophet Muhammad is thought of as quite a violent figure in the Western imagination, but for the thirteen years he was in Mecca, he refused to retaliate in spite of all the humiliation and violence inflicted on him and his followers. Thirteen years is a long time. The other is this notion of solidarity among Muslims—that the Muslim community is one—which basically makes you have empathy for other Muslims who are suffering and enjoins…
Read More…ure. The media and academia are “the enemy” and the Marxism he claims they promote is at the root of an impending social collapse of Western Christendom. And he is vitriolic in his Islamophobia. Breivik apparently was baptized a Protestant, and he does use the Bible, though he does not do so in the way fundamentalists do. In fact, he is explicit that sola scriptura leads to “incipient subjectivism:” The Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura (by sc…
Read More…vatism:” the Free Congress Foundation. The sources also include well known promoters of Islamophobia Pam Geller and Robert Spencer (each referenced more than 50 times) and Andrew Bostrom (whom I wrote about here, and who is referenced about 35 times) and another author writing under the pen name Fjordman (whom he referenced more than 100 times). Initially there was speculation that Fjordman might actually be Breivik but, reading the document close…
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…onstrates in heavily trafficked intersections in the Washington DC area to promote its position likening abortion to the Holocaust, lynching, and genocide. Cote praised an appearance by the anti-contraception activist Steven Mosher at a Defend Life seminar as “awesome,” and echoed Mosher’s claim that “we don’t have enough population.” She told me that, as a “kid of the ’60s” she wasn’t always opposed to contraception, but that “the more we know, t…
Read More…es fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birth rate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run. “It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility” is a grand-sounding observation, isn’t it? So beautifully unimpeachable. It feels like we’re talking about any old inverse relationship: modernity…
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…tations as we find. I was also really interested in the divide between the Western church and the Eastern church and the role that Revelation played in that. Could you say something about some of the other biblical books that were contested? It is really interesting to think that the Christian movement survived for nearly 400 years without a New Testament in the form we have it now. There were books, of course, that circulated from the first centu…
Read More…n of “marriage culture” and “historical understanding” (mostly provided by Western men) to interpret it for us so as to turn it into common sense. Which brings us to the real issue here: common sense. Anderson wants make a common sense (and ostensibly religion-free) argument for one-man-one-woman marriage. But common sense has always been a matter of definition and redefinition. In some times and places, it is or has been common sense for men to o…
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