Religion Dispatches
…ek the The Walking Dead brought its fifth season to a close with a stunning 15.8 million viewers, an accomplishment once unimaginable for a horror franchise. In a thought-provoking coincidence this finale kicked off Holy Week, a sacred period for Christians that culminates symbolically in a particularly terrifying narrative. In general, the horror genre is about the inversion of the natural – and thus sacred – order. Consider Victor Frankenstein w…
Read More…, to give up his body regularly to violence. He survived a house bombing in 1956; a beating with bike chains by the KKK in 1957 when he tried to enroll his children in a white school; and being beaten into unconsciousness—two times. He was arrested 30 to 40 times by his own account, but who can count when you’ve been hosed down, beaten, and wished dead by Bull Connor. Still, Shuttlesworth kept on keeping on. Many do not realize that Shuttlesworth’…
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…n life in the twentieth century, and through the epochal court cases of the 1940s through the 1970s. The Christian Nation “debate” is not really an intellectual contest between legitimate contending viewpoints. Instead, it is a manufactured “controversy” akin to the global warming “debate.” On one side are purveyors of a rich and complex view of the past, including most historians who have written and debated fiercely about the founding era. The “…
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…ns infiltrating the West from within. Or show up on the evening of November 1st, also sans costume, and tell your surprised neighbors that you are Muslim Standard Time. Or reuse what you have in your closet. Come up the driveway in a burqa, abaya, gallabiya or shalwar qamis and, when confused homeowners ask, just say, “dressed as? No, I blew a tire and need some help.” Feign outrage as you pretend to put together the prejudice. You should at least…
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…ate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity. Masonic lodges proliferated in America from the 1720s onward. They were a religious movement as well as a social networking sensation, a pre-electronic Facebook. At first they recruited only affluent gentlemen and professionals, then later a broader…
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…spite the best efforts of business leaders and other reformers in the early 1900s, who wanted a year of 13 evenly spaced months, we still use the idiosyncratic Gregorian calendar, enacted by a 16th century Pope. “The global history of time reform shows how uneven, slow, and full of unintended consequences interconnectedness was,” writes Ogle. She may be overstating the case a bit: time reform was not a perfect, triumphal march for Universal Progre…
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…pretive chasm” separating two versions of the same story; the first told in 1752 and the second in 1836. A monk is told to keep watch over the body of a girl whose family believes has recently died, but instead forces himself upon her sexually. In the morning, it turns out that she is not dead, but was just in a coma. In due course it becomes clear that she is pregnant. In the 1752 version it is assumed that the monk must have known she was alive,…
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…how an LGBTQI identity could possibly coexist within a distinct religious, spiritual, or cultural framework. An underlying paradigm for these circles of support is the Hebrew word, “shalom.” Usually translated “peace,” the word comes from a root meaning “wholeness.” We cannot be at peace until we are completely whole, bringing the entirety of ourselves to our spiritual lives. The need for forums to explore intersections between sexual or gender id…
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…Global South—the descendants of people who were “saved” through the work of 19th century European and North American missionaries—from the descendants of those very same missionaries who no longer find it possible to believe that God hates gays. It’s a drama that is literally tearing apart some of the world’s best-known international communions—Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, even Roman Catholics. Come Sunday is at its most compelling when it sh…
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…e a special duty today to be the guardians of the truth about the American spirit and our national identity.” In fact, Archbishop Gomez argues, immigrant Catholics “without proper documentation,” who share the values of “faith, family, and community” are “the key to American renewal.” Yes, Archbishop Gomez is arguing that unauthorized immigrants not only deserve the chance to adjust their status to live legally in the United States, but also hold…
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