Religion Dispatches
…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…
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…ng to judge you.” Recent studies suggest that while the number of young Americans who consider themselves religious or spiritual remains roughly constant, their spiritual practices are changing. They are more likely than their parents to consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular practice, or the version of the religion they practice boils down to injunctions to a vague sense of morality, fairness, and happiness, what Christian Smith cal…
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…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…
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…with a body that’s under control—a body epitomized in the commercially-fabricated fantasy of physical perfection that pervades popular culture and that undergirds many mainstream medical and self-help discourses on health and healing. Second, the lines distinguishing “religious” from “secular” attitudes toward physicality are far from clear. My analysis of body shame illustrates just how much traditional Christian norms and narratives have been r…
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…anese man asked me, curiously, if these sorts of things didn’t go on in America. Before I could answer (and describe America’s own enchantment), a European patron jumped in, assuring everyone that Japan was much more spiritual and magical than the West. He looked to me to confirm the sentiment, which I did my best to refute. But that reflexive response reinforced in me a suspicion that had been bothering me for some time already—which was that by…
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…death were sheltered in a cave in New Haven. Not surprising then, that American revolutionary and future president John Adams was called “John the Roundhead” as a young lawyer. Much later, in 1786, Adams made a special pilgrimage to key English Civil War battlefields, referring to them as “holy ground.” Looking back at the American Revolution during that same period, Adams recalled that “if Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church…
Read More…Moore and other conference leaders appeared to be caught off guard by the number of LGBT Christians and supportive Christian advocates, some Baptists, who not only attended the entire conference, but also respectfully and publicly responded to Moore’s call to kindness and understanding and offered to meet with conference leaders at the venue. Although there were evidently no face-to-face meetings with Moore, about a dozen LGBT Christians and LGBT…
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…Secular Humanists said that the so-called northern triangle in Central America already has the highest rate of violence against transgender people in Latin America and that the legislation “puts them in an even more vulnerable position.” Russia: More calls for investigation of killings in Chechnya, but is Putin a paper tiger? CNN’s Matthew Chance reported from Moscow on the “terrifying” death threats made by Muslim clerics against Elena Milashina…
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…in Rick Warren’s position. The first is a certain limitation in much of American evangelical theology. Historically the latter has focused primarily on the individual. There have been exceptions, evangelical lobbying for prohibition laws, to name one. But the focus on saving individual souls has had a tendency to override biblical concerns for social justice. There is nothing wrong with this as far as it goes, but it doesn’t fully recognize the co…
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…ristian basis of knowledge, had led to a great moral downfall in modern America. “It isn’t just abortion,” Schaeffer said. “It’s infanticide. It’s allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor’s concept of a quality of life worth living.” Schaeffer said a growing majority of American medical professionals would “easily” and “wantonly” take the life of a child. “Increasingly,” he said, in the lect…
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