Religion Dispatches
…not, in the United States you will be subject to laws that are directly influenced by Christianity’s historical ambivalence about, and even fear of, the body and sex. A dominant line of Christian theology has identified the “lusts of the flesh” with human fallenness—sometimes called “original sin”—and seen sex and the body as places where humans are especially liable to exhibit possessiveness, greed, and corruption. A lesser tradition within Chri…
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…mation of marriage. “For on earth marriage binds us across the ages in the flesh, across families in the flesh, and across the fearful and wonderful divide of man and woman, in the flesh. This is not ours to alter,” it reads. “It is ours, however, to encourage and celebrate….This we affirm.” But in practice, it ended with something more significant—a strengthening of alliances. The event forged and deepened relationships across faith lines. “This…
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…studies” model we have used (i.e., Latino Studies, Asian Studies, etc.) influence how we move forward? SCHOLARS WITHOUT BORDERS Laurie Maffly-Kipp: At the most fundamental level, I’m interested in understanding why people do the things they do. And as a historian, I’m particularly interested in behaviors that don’t make obvious sense to me. Human beings are such puzzles and are motivated by so many different things. It takes a whole arsenal of ap…
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…hate group and white supremacist group content has skyrocketed—even as the numbers of those groups have themselves noticeably increased. For example, the number of known hate groups is reported to have increased from roughly 600 in the year 2000 to 930 in 2014. Moreover, major television networks such as Fox TV have ushered hate content and white supremacist content into the media mainstream, featuring racialized rhetoric that ranges from disparag…
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…t why such similarities exist. Many of the contributors are queer, which reflects the damage—or “nurtured insanity,” as Frank Schaeffer calls it in his foreword—fundamentalist Christianity has done to queer people just based on the number who have left. But it also demonstrates why Christian denominations that trot out their “welcoming and affirming” credentials may need to do more; they may want to spend some serious time listening to new members…
Read More…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…
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…, represented was the triumph of a new kind of mathematical science, where numbers and computation were esteemed in a whole new way. Copernicus, be sure to recall, did not yet have access to the telescope, so he was basing a number of his computations on things he could not see. In this brave new world, then, the scientists were also casting their “faith in things not seen.” It’s just that what they “saw” was perceived to run counter to the Roman…
Read More…ental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roots of these things or attempt to explain why American culture is “exceptional”—exceptional in its toxicity, that is. A growing number of truth telling historians are eager to help us discover these deeper roots if we are willing to listen. H…
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…as the form of Christianity from which he comes, are all steeped in the influence of this movement.” Posner also stresses the importance of the influence of dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism, over the question whether or not someone identifies with these labels: “The other important thing to remember is that Christian Reconstruction and dominionism (and remember Christian Reconstructionism teaches dominionism) are so ingrained in the Ch…
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…delights in surfacing little-known factoids. These include the remarkable number of commercial hucksters who were preachers or else preachers’ kids (e.g., Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant C…
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