Religion Dispatches
…about—is the meaning and purpose of history. Rushdoony called it a “Biblical Philosophy of History;” Barton often uses the term “Providential History.” Either way, it’s all about God’s hand guiding the purpose, history, and future of America. In the promotion for a collection of Rushdoony lectures in an audio CD series last July, Reconstructionist American Vision gives us what could serve as an outline of Barton’s recent show: These lectures are…
Read More
…ouraging embodied practices (most of which are designed to keep an individual alive until the coming day of upload), and establishing a worldview through which all of science, religion, and politics may be judged. The more that Kurzweil or others in the Apocalyptic AI movement receive attention or accolades from the New York Times or Time the more we can expect their movement to grow. This will present a serious challenge to traditional religious…
Read More
…ltiple cups for the communion grape juice, or whether there could be a social hall in the church. Even water fountains could cause consternation. I remember a quite-heated argument, as a high school student, over whether or not church-supported entities like orphan homes and colleges—like Harding—were “scriptural.” Such petty literalism might be atypical in the tradition, but literalists still pick and choose what deserves cultural understanding (…
Read More
…anic lineage, extending back to humankind’s earliest rain-bringers and tribal healers. In the Edo period of Japan, for instance, Kikaku, a close disciple of Zen haiku master Basho, reputedly ended drought by reciting poetry. The flipside of drought is water, and the book continues elementally, in sections which I take to pertain to earth (incarnation), air (devotion), fire (death and dying), and the human (teachers along the path). To appreciate t…
Read More
…dited Merton with returning him and his fellow monks’ thoughts to the central values of mysticism and of solitude. It is only in such a manner that the monk can find the divine love in which celibacy makes sense. Delightfully, the image of such God-infused love came to Father Matthew on his first experience with a motorcycle. “One day everything fell together and I was mounted,” he says somewhat playfully and naughtily. “Is this a good way to make…
Read More
…diocese in 2007; and a participant in the elite Archdiocesan Pastoral Council, alongside Archbishop Chaput himself, and other high-ranking church officials like Msgr. Thomas Fryar. The church’s main tack in the lawsuit, summarized Thomas Birge, Katia’s father, and attorney for part of the case, was representing Hernandez as “the guy setting up chairs in the basement, with no theological, pastoral, or guidance responsibilities.” In fact, Birge argu…
Read More…rk so well, attempts were made to infect patients in an asylum for the mentally ill, through such methods as abrading the skin on men’s genitalia. Reverby stumbled on the story while researching the better-known and just as disturbing experiments on black men with syphilis in Alabama from 1932-1972. In Alabama, the disease wasn’t given to the men, but rather they were identified as having the disease and followed for many years to see its progress…
Read More…“Utah has the highest rate in the country of online porn consumption, mental illness, and passive-aggression,” he says. “For a state to lead in any one of those pathologies is enough for me to step back and say, ‘Hey, what’s going wrong here?’ But for Utah to lead in all three markers is persuasive evidence that we have serious things wrong in our culture.” Part of the pathology is summed up by Dallin H. Oaks’s imperious declaration that “It’s wr…
Read More
…under Nazism. In his book American Fascists, Chris Hedges had drawn direct parallels between the religious right in the United States and the Nazis, but I thought that was not the point. As a Holocaust scholar, I’m deeply uncomfortable with direct parallels, but what I did learn from studying the Nazis was that they were quite pro-sex for their own followers, while denigrating “Jewish” sex as dirty and immoral. They had it both ways, and that was…
Read More
…d guys?”), I didn’t need much convincing to see the episode in terms of familial relations: mixed, missed, and mordant. That many of the relationships played out between the poles of opposition and differentiation made it all germane, for whom among us doesn’t feel the two-way pull? Daddies and daughters, for starters. Daniel and Joseph’s quests to find their daughters led to very different resolutions. While Joseph willingly sacrificed health, re…
Read More