Religion Dispatches
…lded 50,200 hits at last check, and YouTube contains dozens of videos that promote the October 14 prophecy and speculates on its import—one asks believers to carry their cameras today to record proof of the visitation. Equally significant, mediums channeling different extraterrestrial beings have chimed in, claiming that they have received their own confirmations of this evening’s cosmic denouement. Not all the attention appears to have been good….
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…n I read Kamesh Sankaran’s “The Humbling of a Proud Hindu” in Christianity Today, which mixed a genuine spiritual journey with the idea that Christianity is superior to Hinduism. This sort of triumphalism among Christians—particularly converts—is nothing new, but it also hides the realities many Hindus living under Christian contexts face. For example, in southern India, where Sankaran (and my parents) hails from, many poor Hindus couldn’t receive…
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…blacks continues to shape the pervasive racism that structures our society today. As I read this brilliantly heart-breaking and challenging text, which is written in the form of a letter, it occurred to me that young women in the U.S. today (female youth of all ethnic, cultural, and racial backgrounds) need a similar book that explains through a mix of storytelling, history, and critical reflection how the misogynist religious/cultural legacies of…
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…re for all who strive for it. Never mind the Republican Party’s efforts to promote McCarthyist laws that restrict discussions of the history of racism and other supposedly “divisive concepts” in America schools; or its leadership’s denigrating characterizations of political leaders of color with whom they disagree. And who here really cares that the Republican Party has championed voter suppression and gerrymandering that disproportionately affect…
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…dley in Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams explains that today the myth of a Celtic Church attracts “New Agers, post-modernists, liberals, feminists, [and] environmentalists.” While it’s true that many of these groups’ tales of their own origins are mythic—as with any religion, denomination, or sect—the mythic has always served a purpose: to generate usable history, helpful fiction. While Arnold J. Toynbee in the second volume of…
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…of utilitarian “rent-a-collar” approach that is common in movement circles today), but rather political and economic demands that are made on the basis of a moral foundation. It will take wrenching change to transform today’s labor movement. It requires us to think about the labor movement as a moral force in society, not just an economic actor. One of the key lessons from Sea-Tac is that the elements of this new social movement union are everywhe…
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…social justice is alive and well among many practitioners of postural yoga today. In the popular imagination, we tend to imagine yoga as a luxury activity primarily embraced by white suburbanites. Yoga has become a part of popular culture and brand-name yoga commodities are easily accessible among privileged communities across the world. And for a large number of yoga advocates, the claim to possess knowledge of yoga is closely related to the ques…
Read More…La Follette. Jacoby writes correctly that there is no establishment figure today who would dare to say, as Ingersoll said loudly and often, that the glory of America’s founding generation lies precisely in the fact that they consciously did not establish a Christian nation. There is no establishment figure today (Bill Maher does not count) who would dare to have huge public fun at the expense of the pious in the Ingersoll manner—and thus also make…
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…ng shows, without openly proclaiming, that this nuance is sadly lacking in today’s conversations and Supreme Court opinions. Some scholars, in an era of rising Christian Nationalism, are trying to downplay the influence of Rakove’s guides, Jefferson and Madison, on the American government’s relationship with religion in an effort to argue that America is a Christian nation. Rakove euthanizes such attempts with that award-winning prose: “It is enti…
Read More…for Trump to meet a group of about two dozen Christian pastors in New York today. According to CBN, White arranged the meeting on her own initiative, and the meeting is closed to the public. White herself is no stranger to controversy, as she was a target of the Grassley televangelist investigation (with which she refused to cooperate). Last month, speaking at a conference organized by her mentor T.D. Jakes, White defended her refusal to cooperate…
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