Religion Dispatches
…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…
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…Obama has had a most remarkable right-leaning spiritual evolution from Chicago to Washington. Considering Newsweek chose this list to represent the increasingly “diffuse” movement, it missed much of what makes it tick. The people on the list represent a visible slice of the Christian right (or don’t represent the Christian right at all) but it’s precisely because the movement is diffuse that the list doesn’t offer much in the way of illumination…
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…It’s because at some point the actually policy questions embedded in the ACA became symbolic of larger moral questions about government control of private life and who makes decisions about life and death. The same thing happened in the nineteenth century, says historian Robert Wiebe, when seemingly dry technical questions about currency and tariffs assumed an “eternal quality that set them apart as touchstones of public morality,” encapsulating…
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…ity figures in the home, church, and government that has spread far beyond card-carrying members of the IBLP. Fringe theology? If Gothard’s theology of authority structures continues to echo through politicians and organizations that have—knowingly or unknowingly—inherited his teachings, his strict theologies of gender and sexual control live on through the myriad conservative Christian churches and ministries whose own theologies of gender and se…
Read More…of gay groups to ‘persuade this society by manipulation or dishonest political campaigning.’” Chaplin sees nothing wrong with the church and state speaking together with one voice. “The idea of an inevitable conflict between the church and the state is a peculiarity of Western civilization,” he says. “For the Orthodox civilization and way of life, as well as Islamic civilization, the very idea of the conflict between the religious community and po…
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…hurch, “the question of women’s ordination is a ‘second tier issue’ that local leaders can address in their own contexts.” In other words, they’re conservative evangelicals who are going to stay rigidly opposed to marriage equality, but might allow women to be ordained—maybe. After all that, the pastor of a congregation that has decided to stay in the denomination for now talks about grieving for the people who have left, and—twenty-five paragraph…
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…detail literally picked us up and moved us. I’m almost losing my shorts, because I can’t hold on to everything. And then they just put us inside the press barricade, where uniformed police officers and state troopers were not doing a damned thing. At that point, projectiles started being thrown through Emancipation Park. We don’t know what they were, but we were told that these nazi groups were taking soda cans and putting concrete in them, and us…
Read More…sts at all). I also received an e-mail from a participant in the event who came by because of RD: Dear Haroon, Thanks for your talk at WSU tonight and [for] your perspective on things. In many ways I feel that the American attachment to sensationalism, half truths and fear makes your perspective all the more important. I work with internationals at WSU and lately have made some friends among the Islamic community. I have studied side by side with…
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…c abnormality, fell ill in late January, the Duggars actually replaced the candidate on the campaign trail in Florida. Religious differences (the Duggars are Baptists who have followed the fundamentalist teachings of Bill Gothard, while Santorum is a staunch Catholic) seem barely a second thought among supporters, who take for granted that fidelity to culture war issues supercedes faith. There, the Duggars and Santorum seem to speak with one voice…
Read More…al terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rituals, sacred texts, and physical spaces that all serve to bind the participants together. Atheism has none of these things—most of the time it’s an individual choice, made and kept alone. In my piece, I point out how eve…
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