Religion Dispatches
…igious banger among comedians during his post-Sixties ascent. Instead, his latest specials and interviews were knit with remorse. “I think the human race has squandered its gift,” he said, “and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers.” Another time he paralleled the product with piety. “I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain…
Read MoreAs David Cook prepared for his victory on the latest season of American Idol, the Republican state chairwoman of Georgia was engaged in paying reverence to a different type of American idol. In a bizarre moment in the world of mixing religion and politics, Sue Everhart compared Republican presidential candidate John McCain to Jesus and America to God. Addressing McCain’s patriotism and devotion to America even while being tortured as a prisoner o…
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…of words—as thoroughly test-marketed as a Viagra commercial—represents the latest in a decades-long series of efforts by religious conservatives to thwart the steady advance of public acceptance of gays and lesbians into the mainstream of American life. According to an analysis of polling data published by CBS News, Americans are becoming more “gay friendly” at a rate of about one percent a year. Still, that means that only 45 percent of Californi…
Read More…ed as “uppity” according to the rules of the racial lexicon. Moreover, the latest media frenzy seems to prove that Senator Obama is in a no-win situation in terms of Rev. Wright. Despite Senator Obama’s public denouncements of his former pastor, many argued that the senator’s protestations were little more than a smokescreen. But now Rev. Wright has made it clear that the pastor/parishioner relationship ends in the church vestibule. Wright even de…
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…ng time. It is the very interest of this analysis that made David Brooks’s latest column so unsettling. Just before the election, when he was defending the Greenspan legacy, Brooks suggested that Greenspan was a gifted number cruncher but that we had entered a strange and more volatile and more challenging psychological crisis of confidence to which he could not speak. My rejoinder was that there was nothing psychological about the crisis at all;…
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…Suskin Ostriker (Rutgers University Press, 2009). Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s latest book of essays will make provocative reading for liberals who want to say “Yes, We Can” to taking back the Bible as it seeks to pry a few more fingers from the iron grip conservatives have had on its meaning in the American cultural imagination. This Bible is not, Ostriker wants us to see, the sole property of those who deny the links between “spirituality and sex, s…
Read More…arming, and human cloning” as subjects in which educators are required to “promote critical thinking skills.” It also requires “supplemental materials” to be used alongside textbooks in public school science class. Forrest and the Louisiana Citizens for Science lobbied fiercely against the creationist language, but, in the end, only three members of the House voted against it because they feared crossing Jindal, who is closely allied the Louisiana…
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…children’s literature? Bubbling up under the surface of The Magicians (the latest novel from Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman) is the stuff of these same sincere elements—the kind many readers relish when looking to escape with a good book. On first glance, he offers us not only a world filled with magic, but a school for young magicians, the adventures of aspiring young sorcerers, magical creatures and spells, fantastic landscapes galore, a…
Read More…:8-9 to be exact. The poll is in service to the American Bible Society’s latest vanity Bible — the Poverty and Justice Bible that features a cover depicting breaking chains. On the inside you’ll find more than 2,000 verses that deal with issues of poverty and justice bolded by a bright orange highlight. “The Poverty and Justice Bible seeks to challenge the notion that the Bible is outdated and proves that God — not politicians, celebrities or ev…
Read More…time of war. This may well be why the president is taking so long to commit himself to a new strategy in Afghanistan. He is trying to re-imagine what that war is about, against whom it is being waged, and what its new purposes are, once we stop imagining it as “the latest front in a global war on terror.” That requires imagination, as well as determination and strength of purpose. This Guantanamo decision is thus perhaps the first step toward the…
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