Religion Dispatches
…campaign, our evangelicals—including among them many of “my” Baptists—were promoting a slew of “social issues,” but precious little “gospel.” Self-proclaimed and media-designated evangelicals had done everything they could to defeat President Obama, and in the process they discredited the evangelical message and reduced it to a mere political gospel. From where I’m sitting, it’s obvious that they need to engage in the kind of soul-searching th…
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…of “divinanimal” exclusion. Environmental thinkers have long charged that “Western” culture, particularly contemporary North American culture, and particularly Christianity, is anthropocentric. Everything revolves around the human being, like planets around the sun. Together, I think, Eliade’s and Derrida’s ideas bring divinity and animality close together: they become intimate in ways that exclude humans, or that beckon to them. Are we haunted by…
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…ent is still relevant—not just because its characters continue to populate Western art and culture, but because it holds a mirror up to our all-too-human behavior. The collages I created are meant to invite metaphorical over literal interpretations. The decision to illustrate in collage resulted from observations I made during my adventures in biblical studies. When I first learned about the different editorial layers that have been identified thr…
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…ch celebrated the power of sentiments and affects, rather than the French (promoted by figures like Descartes and Voltaire), which advanced the work of reason and rationality. My critical question for Brooks might boil down to something like this: why turn to psychology and cognitive science in attempts to “prove” that increasingly hollow humanist terms such as “character” (or meritocratic values such as “achievement”) can be substantiated, or pro…
Read More…reflexively defends the Israeli government’s policies, but it is actively promoting the idea that the conflict there is not over land or politics, but is a clash of civilizations and religions. “Freedom” is not about human rights for all; it’s about Christianity ascendant. At the Freedom Federation Summit in Lynchburg, Virginia, last month, an entire session was devoted to “Israel, the Middle East, and Military Readiness.” (The event as a whole w…
Read More…onal war between the west and the rest, doesn’t embrace the superiority of western civilization (which can also be read as Obama doesn’t embrace “American exceptionalism.”) Second, and probably even more important, for an evangelical and Christian Zionist like Huckabee, Churchill is a figure of enormous symbolic power. In this scenario, Obama is an appeaser like Chamberlain — whether it’s on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or in failing to address the “…
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…own Christian horror show. Hell houses spread throughout the Southern and Western United States garnering lots of attention and claiming plenty of converts. In 2001, filmmaker George Ratliff took notice of the phenomenon in his wonderfully rendered documentary Hell House. In the last decade, a new version of the Hell House, a softer and gentler version, has appeared known as “Judgement House” (yes, always judgement with two ‘e’s…
Read More…of the same from the “ex-gay” camp. What striking is that Chambers is not promoting so-called conversion therapy, which some religious conservatives claim can convert gays and lesbians to a straight sexual orientation. Rather, he acknowledges that, for gays and lesbians, homosexual attraction never goes away. But he suggests that homosexuals can resist those urges through Christianity Gilgoff then goes on to quote the interview at length, especia…
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…ople hold religious sentiments of one kind or another. Even if they don’t, Western culture stands on a deep-seated conviction that humans are more than the sum of their parts. Claiming authoritatively that we’re just brains in vats is an indirect challenge to such sentiments. That same spirit of subversion has been behind a recent wave of books lambasting religion. Yet the ascent of thinkers like Dawkins, Dennett, and Sam Harris is just one more c…
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…can’t pass laws or rules against their use of public spaces. This is what Western democracy and pluralism is all about. There are choices you can make about who to be, and how. As long as those choices do not harm others around you, one choice should be equal to another. Whether I keep my maiden name or change it, whether I wear pants or a skirt, whether I live with my parents or by myself, whether I ride a motorcycle or drive a car, I should not…
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