Religion Dispatches
…my phone. Breitbart, though, is hardly the first, second, or even third website I’ll check. Actually Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’ “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the AltRight” might be the first Breitbart essay to have held my attention. But it did more than that. There’s always a few articles we come across, perhaps every month, that don’t just engage us, but force us to go back and read them a few more times. In fact they’re fu…
Read More…school with a burn mark on his arm in the shape of a cross. His parents visited the school, looking for answers. When they felt they didn’t get them, they filed suit against both the Mt. Vernon School District and Freshwater. The district settled with the Dennis family last summer, although the suit against Freshwater awaits. Meanwhile, a federal judge in the civil suit against Freshwater issued an order last week directing Freshwater’s attorneys…
Read More
…human groups into an “organism-equivalent.” In fact, those religions that best encourage people to feel they belong to one another, tend to be the ones that last and grow. Far from being a mistake, religion may provide the best evolutionary explanation for humankind’s success. Of course, accounting for the origins of something proves nothing about its worth—philosophers call that the genetic fallacy. There are also reasons to question Wilson’s ev…
Read More…spare time, has enlisted a Jewish friend to defend him on his campaign website. Coming to the defense of Iott, the tea party candidate who has apparently scared the bejeezus out of Republican whip Eric Cantor, is Richard Gabai, a Hollywood actor, writer, and producer known (or perhaps not) for titles such as Assault of the Party Nerds 2: The Heavy Petting Detective, Virgin High (which naturally takes place at a Catholic girls’ school and was foll…
Read MoreA study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Americans who don’t believe in God scored better on a religious study quiz than those who identify with a specific religion. The U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, a nationwide poll of 3,412 Americans age 18 and older, found that out of 32 questions related to various religions, atheists and agnostics typically got the most correct responses. Jews and Mormons also scored higher than…
Read More
…ally, Marable himself passed away only days before the publication of this bestselling work, but the impact it made—settling on the bestseller lists, for example—only underscores the scale of his scholarship, and the relevance it has to our world. Growing up, Haley’s Autobiography was profoundly influential in the formation of my own identity—along with Muhammad Iqbal’s own works, both sustained me when Maryam Jameelah and the Islam of ideology wa…
Read More
…g imperative as those older ones. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the best voices in pop criticism are more diverse than the best voices in the American academy. The materials of mass culture are simply more accessible to a wider population, and when you create a fairer space for competitive possibility, you’ll find a more diverse set of people at the top. That said, I am a big fan of academic nerds, and I openly borrow from the creativity an…
Read More
This year saw the launch of the Cubit: RD’s answer to the mainstream media’s coverage of the intersection of religion and science—those too-familiar stories in which religion and science are represented as either fundamentally at odds, or oddly conjoined. Over the past nine months we have debated, among other things, multiverse theory with Rob Bell, investigated the cultural roots of the anti-vaccine movement, critiqued Silicon Valley asceticism,…
Read More
…of times because we still live in the greatest nation on earth. It is the best of years because we have the freedom to speak our minds. It is the best of years because we can organize as we see fit to support the political candidates of our choice.” Frederick Clarkson, a longtime observer of and writer about right-wing movements, pointed out that Weyrich “was a catalyst for pulling together the disparate parts of the conservative movement into a…
Read More
…als than symbolic statements articulating the historic prejudices of great numbers of Americans, who feared immigrants generally, and he decline of white American nationalism particularly.” And voila! Ten months later, and the primary enabler, publisher, and purveyor of those fears, Stephen Bannon, sits aside the President-Elect, while fake news outlets, white supremacist sites, and messengers of a populist ethno-nationalism have ascended to a cen…
Read More