Religion Dispatches
…12 candidacy. If you watch religion (which you must if you’re reading this site), Pawlenty is a former Catholic-turned-Baptist who attends the Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a suburban megachurch pastored by Rev. Leith Anderson, the Minnesotan-mild-mannered head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Which means the 2012 race as it stands looks like a thoroughly correlated (our word for orthodox) Mormon (Romney), a recently-mint…
Read More…oll assembled by talk show host Janet Mefferd have disappeared from her website without explanation. Just like that. For now, anyway. This comes just a day after RD published Eric Miller’s piece on the ways that terms like “Civility,” “Unity,” and “Tolerance” are manipulated in order to draw attention away from indiscretions, injustice, and other transgressions. In fact Driscoll himself, with his meandering attempt to redefine Tolerance, makes a…
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…letter at the time it was sent (reproductions of the letter on numerous websites, including Throckmorton’s, do not include his signature, while the letter currently on the Exodus site does). In March 2010, a year after the initial conference, the organization issued a formal public statement opposing the criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda. In contrast to the open letter, this statement was signed by over 50 people in the Exodus network, in…
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…o national outcry from white evangelicals. Instead, Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo hosted a fundraiser to support 17-year-old domestic terrorist Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounded a third. Again, having grown up in the Christian nationalist tradition, none of this is surprising. As Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, explained to…
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…l is his defense of that enterprise. One of the clever features of the Web site, in fact, is that one can in fact purchase “personal protection gear” via links to Amazon. Disease, the Internet, and Cultural Anxiety If there’s a hero in American Fever, it might be, in fact, the Internet itself. Technology does not, as in other stories of scientific heroism, create a cure for the virus. Instead, the Internet is what allows the narrator to manage his…
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Religion Dispatches, your favorite indie religion site (and go-to source for awkward dinner conversation starters) is nominated for a 2015 Webby Award in the Religion & Spirituality category. We are thrilled! The Webbys are the Oscars of the Internet. We’ve been honored with a Webby nomination a number of times before and it never gets old. But… we confess we’re starting to nurture a bit of a Susan Lucci complex — always a nominee, never (yet) a…
Read More…need a “spiritual army” to fight Islam. I can’t find anything on Kyl’s website condemning that. Nor can I find anything on Kyl’s website condemning the use of the term “spiritual warfare” to describe a conflict between America and Islam, or the promotion of that term by Boykin, and other religious right leaders, including James Dobson and Gary Bauer. I actually searched Kyl’s site for the word “warfare,” and found only this: “Some on the liberal…
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…ticles offer the same genre of ritual satisfaction. We tool about news Web sites and newspapers looking for topics to murmur to our loved ones. “Did you see this, about the molester who won the lottery?” “Can you believe this kid shot his sister for some Ruffles?” Contemporary sacrifice is for mealtime marveling, shared to remind each other (beg each other) to be good, to be human, to try very hard not to tape (shoot, stab, maim, molest, rape, or…
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…o by the legal system. Indeed, there are books on choosing your major, Web sites filled with advice, and even quizzes to take online to figure out what major would be best for you. Postmodernism as Gateway Drug to Atheism And, now, there has been an explosion of reporting on choice of college major—and religiosity—in the higher education press and the blogosphere. Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education reported on the w…
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…e date when the very famous Laocoön Group was discovered at a construction site in Rome. The Pope heard about the discovery, and sent Michelangelo to assess the statue’s value; when even that great visual artist walked away flabbergasted by its quality, the Pope had it brought to the Vatican. But there was no museum, not then and not until much later. Rather, Julius II, a famous (and infamous) Renaissance pope, built a very traditional-looking scu…
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