Religion Dispatches
…ia malpractice on this issue, one wonders if we’ve been fully brainwashed away from even understanding this topic in any way. Basically, some people, known colloquially as “all people throughout all space and time in all religions and lands until 15 minutes ago,” believed that marriage was a nice way of saying “men and women are different and complementary and this is the way we organize their relationship in all its complexity, including all the…
Read More
…inal sin—although that knowledge is truly indispensable—but also about the way class works and the way concentrated wealth throttles the democratic process and the way America’s aggregated wealth has been and is, in fundamental ways, stolen from the rest of the world’s people and from the planet itself. If I were preaching this or even counseling an individual congregant, I would say “God needs you to get out of the bubble! God is fully awake to t…
Read More
…upposed to be. Again, I think the sacraments give us some guidance in that way. The church has always been practicing communion. What does that mean in our culture and our lives? What does it mean to practice confession and baptism and its significance? Votive candles (some marked with names of those for whom prayers are being offered) flicker in the nave of New York City’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine during an evensong service in D…
Read More
…nough about Judaism to say that, well, there are very similar elements, or ways of interpreting Judaism, which would make it very close to how I understand Christianity. But I will say that the ludicrousness of Christianity has always attracted me. The idea of incarnation, and the idea of the most powerful (namely, God) taking on the mantle of the flesh in order to redeem a humanity that’s sinned; as the premise for a religion it always struck me…
Read More
…n-making, respect for individuals as they figure out (read: discern) their way. What remains to be seen is if structural changes in the institutional church, inclusive forms of participation—yes, democracy—will flow from his words. There is a logical contradiction in imposing a new model, even a democratic one, from on high. Will Francis be as good a theo-politician as he is a pastor? It will take some doing to transform without repeating the auto…
Read More
…uch as murder, destitution, and various forms of domination. Theism is one way of trying to make sense of all this, but not the only way. Part of the function of the concept of sacred value in our discourse is to mark off a zone where it seems inappropriate to engage in the calculations of cost and benefit that are appropriate in market transactions. Blessedness in the sense of sacredness is therefore intimately tied up with the justified desire t…
Read More
…la Baker and James Lawson and so many other civil rights heroes who made a way where there was no way, today’s religious trimmers and equivocators appear unwilling to name the system and oppose it with all their moral being. Apparently they do not want to be ridiculed in the Washington circles of influence they so yearn to enter. How pathetic, and also (I say this as a Christian): how un-Christlike. As a few astute commentators have pointed out, i…
Read More
…ew of Robertson’s neoconservative allies to break with him in any decisive way—although one former neocon, Michael Lind, denounced him in a major exposé in the New York Review of Books. Moral of the story: Although this item overlaps with the one just considered—Robertson as central to the Republican coalition—I rank it separately and higher because anti-Robertsonite conservatives in the Republican Coalition at least have some alibi in relation to…
Read More
…r prayers. But these ultra-devout performers share a peculiar space with a number of other artists whose personal faiths are inconsequential to their public personae but whose fluency in the holy plays out in, well, mysterious ways. Lana Del Rey’s catalogue runs deep with both religious imagery and sentiment; waves of apostasy crash over moments of divine revelation and then reverse course back into faith again. She may have claimed “God’s dead…[a…
Read More
…pensive a procedure it becomes.” Regarding the “Governing Agenda” of Third Way and Faith in Public Life, however, she notes that “it is not only a matter of having the prevention work and catching up to the reality of unintended pregnancies. We know from the experience of other countries with terrific sexuality education and available contraception that there will always be a need for abortion care.” In addition to the silence in the political are…
Read More