Religion Dispatches
…roying priceless artefacts that are thousands of years old, in the group’s latest rampage…” As is the case in the Guardian‘s coverage, the story is often accompanied by Islamic State video showing black-clad, bearded extremists taking power tools to ancient Assyrian and Akkadian statues. We watch in horror as ancient statues of massive winged bulls have their faces erased by jack-hammers and we see statues being toppled over. According to the Guar…
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…des, moral reform movements, and generations of political activism. In his latest book, Matthew Avery Sutton, a professor of history at Washington State University, traces this history of American evangelical apocalypticism from the end of the 19th century to the present day. In the process, he proposes a revised understanding of American evangelicalism, focused on the urgent expectations of the end of human history. If you want to understand mode…
Read More…nstitutional “conscience.” So as much as it pains me to admit it, Winters’ latest post is 100 percent correct. In discussing the stir that President Obama created yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast when he chided Christians for conveniently forgetting their history of committing atrocities, such as the Crusades and the Inquisition, in the name of religion, he writes: Indeed, the best way to point out that the specific conflation of religio…
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…create more meaningful roles for women in the church, but if the Vatican’s latest bumbling effort to do so is any indication, it might be better for the pope to just say something else cute about puppies or bunnies. At its three-day annual meeting beginning today the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture will be discussing “Women’s Culture: Equality and Difference.” As the title suggests, the meeting is less an attempt to advance the status of…
Read More…been tied to an exposure at Disneyland. It appears that the source of this latest infection was likely either a foreign tourist or an American who returned carrying the disease from abroad, but the outbreak has brought renewed attention to the anti-vaccination movement (like this RNS commentary arguing that “Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail”). What hasn’t been highlighted is the fact that the increased instances of mea…
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…charist,” thundered David Virtue of virtueonline.org, who concluded, “This latest outrage will only hasten the church’s demise.” Many, though not all, of these Anglicans reject any role for women as priests or bishops. And so for them, Heather Cook’s crime spree began with her ordination, and continued because the church that consecrated her was terminally ill. Follow Jesus into the neighborhood; travel lightly. While there are points of life and…
Read More…to convince American Jews that Democrats are harmful to Israel. The RJC’s latest release—”What Exactly Did President Obama Mean By That?”—takes such an aggrieved posture that you’d think the president had referred to “powerful banking interests” or, while praising the caterers for the delicious matzoh, casually referenced the disappearance of Christian children. Nope: According to today’s New York Times, at the Democratic Senate retreat yesterday…
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…religion and war go together like a horse and carriage, news broke of the latest atrocity-of-the-day: the beheading of 21 Egyptian men by ISIS, apparently in Tripoli. The men were Coptic Christians, from an Egyptian village where Christians and Muslims have lived together peaceably, but where lack of employment opportunities compel men to look for work abroad. According to NPR, one of the brothers of the victims of the gruesome executions invoked…
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…xible enough or are somehow unavailable for selective appropriation by new promoters and practitioners won’t successfully make the jump into previously untapped cultures. One more essential process is required for a practice to succeed in 21st century capitalist America: it needs to be commodified for the marketplace. Mindfulness comes to us packaged with Colorado retreats for high-powered professionals, training sessions at Google (which gets lot…
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…the study of religion should move forward is for it to hitch itself to the latest star in the universe of social causes, it has ceased being an academic discipline: it has ceased conceiving research projects and teaching courses that have an integrity of their own. What are the main questions that the study of religion should address? Are there problems of religion in the same sense as there are sociological (not “social”) problems, as Peter Berge…
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