Religion Dispatches
…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….
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…ulture. Housed within the new museum will be the Center for the Study of African American Religion, a $10 million project that aims to further research on the inextricable role spirituality has played in black America’s past and present. I took a moment to speak with its recently appointed chief curator [and current advisor to RD’s “Remapping U.S. Christianities” initiative], the Rev. Yolanda Pierce, about the goals of the center and the narrative…
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…than in the leadership? My congregation has been very supportive. A small number of people chose to leave. Some of them not because of their feelings around the issue of homosexuality, but they just struggled with the church being in the news. But that was a small number, and most folks have been very receptive. Many immediately began telling me about their family members, and all of their personal stories. My vulnerability in sharing let them op…
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…tuencies has influenced what Obama believes he can and cannot say. As an African American whose father came from a Muslim family, he is under even more pressure than most candidates to avoid being labeled as “anti-Israel.” Ironically, a strong case can be made that the right-wing militaristic policies he may feel forced to defend actually harm Israel’s legitimate long-term security interests. A Political Necessity? If indeed Obama took these hard-…
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…. There are other surprises in the study. One of the milder ones is that African Americans are more dubious that vaccination programs take the needs of those being vaccinated into consideration than other demographics across the board. That is to say, African Americans trust the vaccination system to serve whites and Hispanics even less than those groups do! Other surprises: while Americans without a religious faith routinely come in as one of the…
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…riginal meaning while maintaining a strong degree of philological and historical-critical rigor in their development of ethical interpretations. The members of the Conservative Bible project have moved precisely in the opposite direction, insisting that they are restoring the original, authentic meaning without having any historical, linguistic, or ethical justifications for their interpretive choices. The Future of Wiki Translation Nevertheless,…
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…context; people may want to apply them to later times but there is no historical basis to do so. God’s speeches granting the right to the land of Israel to the descendants of Abraham is no more or less historical than his revoking it—both are ancient literature applicable only to ancient realities. Maimonides, Mendelssohn, and Messianism You can’t have it both ways. If God’s condemnation of Israel is only relevant in its ancient historical context…
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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…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…
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…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…
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