Religion Dispatches
…the purview of the Buddhist Churches of America or the Buddhist Council of New York. Consider Naropa University, the Institute of Buddhist Studies, University of the West, and Soka University of America—the four fully-accredited, Buddhist-affiliated, degree-granting institutions of higher education in the United States. Consider the Insight Meditation Society, the San Francisco Zen Center, and Shambhala Mountain Center, each of which attract thous…
Read More
…Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab-American Association in New York, sharply critiqued the cover on the Melissa Harris-Perry show, noting that “These are things that all Muslims have in their house. There’s nothing about that that tells you a story about what terrorism looks like. So you’re telling me that when my friends who are not Muslim come into my home and see a Koran and see frames on the wall with a scripture from my religi…
Read More
…oughts and fantasies count as forbidden sexual activity. While the secular world may view this as a fairly prudish perspective, many evangelicals view it as sinful because God wants Christians to enjoy sex as he created it: in the confines of monogamous, heterosexual matrimony. Watching porn gets in the way of Christians fully experiencing what God designed. But while evangelicals may believe that God designed sex to be pleasurable for married cou…
Read More
…himself suggests, influential journalists like the executive editor of the New York Times, Bil Keller, seem to agree. The Rovian Rift Admittedly, complaints about secularism are more than just the product of ‘religion’ experts vying for a seat at the table in the public sphere. For the most part, cries against secularism in America these days come from key portions of evangelical Protestantism that were organized, mobilized, and—some would say—rad…
Read More
…e simply must read. As a columnist for the Financial Times, writer for the New York Times Magazine and senior editor at the Weekly Standard, Caldwell’s reactions to the global processes that have provoked massive population flows and undermined the hegemony of the nationalist narrative are fascinating. That he prefers argument by culture, metaphysics, and identity reveals a deep anxiety among even the most privileged, a sign that capital and its i…
Read More
…New Orleans to parts of Louisiana that, in the words of Zeitlin, “kind of crumble off into the sinews down in the gulf where the land is getting eaten up.” He made his way to Terrebonne Parish, where he found inspiration on a narrow strip of land surrounded by a dilapidated ring of levees built to protect the two dozen remaining French and Indian families of Isle de Jean Charles from hurricanes and anything else the Gulf of Mexico throws at them. …
Read More
…national organization, the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (CPCF) scrubbed their site of references to Project Blitz in the face of intense public scrutiny. The erasure included the names of the chairs and members of the prayer caucuses.) Although CPCF is not as well known as Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, it’s led by former eight-term member of Congress, Randy Forbes (R-VA) and boasts, as Congressional Advisors, 22 si…
Read More
…Miller was a farmer and self-anointed Bible interpreter from Low Hampton, New York, near Lake Champlain. Whereas Camping’s prediction (as I understand it) was based on his dating of Noah’s flood, Miller devised a complex numerological formula based, at least in part, on the reign of Artaxerxes and the “seventy weeks” mentioned in the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible. All of that computed to sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. W…
Read More…was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an interview with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, “We are not a weird pe…
Read More…state of disbelief and objectivity into a realm of complicity. In a recent New York Times interview, co-writer Damon Lindelhof suggests, One of the things that we completely own is that in many ways Lost is a mash-up/remix of our favorite stories, whether that’s Bible stories from Sunday school or Narnia or Star Wars or the writings of John Steinbeck. Carlton and I both had to take philosophy classes when we were in college, and we talk about phil…
Read More