Religion Dispatches
…long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction. As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on how a President Romney would govern a country, and a planet, from which he would in the afterlife depart, becoming th…
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…nimagined forms–no reason to call it “secular.” His curatorial interest in promoting consciousness turned “in part on a suggestive paradox: How can modernist aesthetics be reconnected with a complex mystical tradition from which it has never been separated?” (italics mine). In other words, how may the modern museum escape the fiction of its own secularity and thereby rediscover its spiritual roots, its spiritual task? It is telling that Sweeney’s…
Read More…d-be Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, as noted in RD, has said her work in promoting school choice is fueled by her desire to “confront the culture in which we live today to help advance God’s Kingdom.” Allowing public education funding to go to religious schools is, according to some, the foundational issue of the Christian right. But it’s not just within the Trump administration where the Christian right will likely hold sway. The Christian righ…
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…ty as a faith practice is fringe even within white nationalist communities today, but the language and the ideas have been adopted by several prominent thought leaders in the current far-right, and the fact that these lines are being spoken openly to wild applause speaks volumes about the real opinions of the America First movement as a whole, regardless of their Young Republicans Club aesthetic. That Torba was that open about this language is an…
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…of progress. “I’m deeply encouraged by the movement made in the Convention today,” lawyer, abuse survivor and SBC advisor Rachael Denhollander told the Houston Chronicle. “Ed Litton’s character and positions give me hope that significant positive change is possible for the denomination.” Indeed, Litton agreed to an independent audit of the SBC’s handling of sexual abuse issues, a move Southern Baptist author and speaker Daniel Darling lauded in hi…
Read More…g to translate Catholic doctrine into public policy, largely foreshadowing today’s debates about the rights of Christians, or any followers of a specific religion, to impose their values on others. “There is a Catholic law on birth control. There is a Catholic law on abortion. I accept the Catholic law. There is no Catholic law on what you have to do about imposing birth control on others,” Cuomo said. After O’Connor called out Ferraro for being a…
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…eeklies’ born-again fondness for religious authority has not endured until today. Since the explosion of the clergy sex abuse scandals in the media, a curious trend has emerged on the covers of news magazine. In four Time covers—April 1, 2002, November 27, 2006, June 7, 2010, February 25, 2013—the familiar figure of the pope appears, but altered. Unlike the scores of previous covers featuring the Bishop of Rome, the pope now stands either with his…
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…lived partially as Jews, and had some status in the Jewish community. But today’s non-Jewish Jews aren’t identifying as such because they live in Jewish enclaves, but because identifying as “Jewish” has become an asset and fashionable; it’s no longer a liability. The impact this community will have on the Jewish community remains to be seen. *Read more from “Pew and the Jews: ‘So What?’”, an RD special feature on the Pew survey. Like this story?…
Read More…licy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differing political orders. This realization has led us to pose a number of crucial questions to those engaged in the promotion of religious freedom as a stable and singular human right. These questions, explored in detail in the PoRF volume…
Read More…S Newsroom reads: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regrets today’s decision. California voters have twice been given the opportunity to vote on the definition of marriage in their state and both times have determined that marriage should be recognized as only between a man and a woman. We agree. Marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of society. “We recognize that this decision represents only the opening of a vigorous d…
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