Religion Dispatches
…rican Center for Law and Justice’s activities in Zimbabwe (where ACLJ also promotes recognition of a “Christian nation”): The Zimbabwe outpost of the ACLJ isn’t Robertson’s first foray into Africa. Earlier this year, prosecutors in the war crime trial of former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor alleged that the televangelist had lobbied the Bush White House on his behalf in exchange for lucrative gold mining contracts—a claim Robertson denied. And i…
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…caretakers of the land that they’ve committed themselves to live—and die—on. Maybe it’s best to save the word “martyr” for other, more violent witnessing happening now in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. But after seeing Of Gods and Men here, I’m not sure that it doesn’t apply, and in the best of senses….
Read More…years ago the prophet Ezekial told us exactly which nations in the Middle East would join forces to start a major war. What you’re seeing on the television screen is exactly this,” Hagee said, stringing together a series of non sequitur headlines to make a case for . . . a case for . . . . Jesus? Almost forty years ago, California Christian pastor Hal Lindsey offered a Cold War inflected vision of the endtimes in his bestselling and widely influe…
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…man Catholicism in November of 1938. Less than two years later, during the Easter season of 1941, he made a retreat to the storied Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, a Benedictine retreat founded in 1846 situated in a stunning valley less than twenty miles from Abraham Lincoln’s birth home and childhood farm. Merton was accepted as a petitioner into the Abbey of Gethsemani in December of that same year. Taking the name of Father Louis, a…
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…h has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman? The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this…
Read More…n every direction from its traditional heartland: south into black Africa, east into Southeast Asia and the Philippines, north into Europe. And also West: the fastest-growing religion in the United States is Islam. Islam’s thrust northward into Europe, the heartland of Western culture, is worth a closer look. Islamic immigration into France has been so massive as to reverse the verdict of the battle of Tours; southern France now has more mosques t…
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…argument that the Reuters article overlooked other newsworthy or higher priority items in the Pope’s address—economic justice, the environment, and violence in the Middle East—is more legitimate, but he can’t claim that the Pope didn’t suggest that gay marriage threatens humanity. He did….
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…techniques, but his yoga was still a countercultural practice to say the least. Modern yoga had quite a long way to go before it would undergo popularization. All this, and yet Bardach writes about Vivekananda as though he reflected something mainstream in American culture: “His prescription for life was simple, and perfectly American: ‘work and worship.’” And she claims that Vivekananda’s popularity waned because America’s “baby boomers commande…
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…these were (or were not) “real” ordinations. At least some churches in the East have decided that the ordinations of women deacons were “real.” For Roman Catholics, the jury on that question is still out. I saw recently that Paulist Press, your publisher, provided an opportunity for readers to buy copies for the US Catholic bishops. Do you expect that they’ll read the book? Phyllis Zagano (PZ): I think they will. My own bishop asked for a copy, as…
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…ion of Mormons’ “weird” beliefs is political. Mormons are the last (or at least the latest) religious “other” to confront the heart of American politics, to deem themselves American enough to ascend to the presidency. Mormon scholar Newell Bringhurst told me recently that that the current public debates over Mormonism reminds him very much of the debate over Kennedy’s Catholicism in 1960. “Would Kennedy take orders from the Vatican?” many leaders…
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