Religion Dispatches
…al church. So too if you see an ensemble of people up front clutching microphones and singing with their eyes closed. This is called a “worship team” or a “praise band.” Episcopalians (thank God!) don’t do praise bands. When it’s time for congregational singing in an Episcopal church, the organ music will swell and the congregation rises to its feet unbidden. If, on the other hand, someone steps out front and announces a page number, you’re in a B…
Read More…rofound meaning system—a sinking realization seeps in that there’s no easy way of escaping the cold, emptiness of the world. That is, you aren’t really special or connected to the Divine—hence, a situational crisis that calls for meaning-making attempts to achieve a positive resolution in the new world. During her transition out of the faith, the author wonders, “if this is all there is” in the new world. This further illuminates how painstakingly…
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…nism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason. (“Ur-Fascism” is the title of Eco’s article.) The president’s critics are familiar with the idea that his followers constitute a cult of Trump. What his critics fail to understand, mostly, is that this cult was always already functioning under different names in different places for different reasons. But on…
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…bodies from their ‘natural’ fallenness. Once again, the God we serve has always done the opposite. Jesus has always set women free.” It’s hard to know how Barr could prove such a statement, given the facts of Christian history and even the stories about Jesus in early Christian literature. Barr’s methodology invites scrutiny because she lets the Bible—and therefore those who defer to it—get away with, well, patriarchy. Barr saves Paul from himself…
Read More…story. We are reluctant to change, and so it is often easier to accept the way things have always been. “Why risk what change might bring? Fifty years ago women could not serve on juries in this country and had to resign from the Civil Service when they got married, two things that seem unbelievable today but which were supported at the time by many good and honourable people who were unable to see the damage these policies were causing, or the va…
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…arian foundation” for the life of unbelief. Comte-Sponville says that his “way of being an atheist,” was influenced by the Catholicism of his youth. He acknowledges the positive aspects of faith. And then there is Ronald Aronson, a philosopher teaching at Wayne State University and contributor to Religion Dispatches, who first laid out a critique of the New Atheists in a review of their books in the Nation published in June 2007. “Where does the w…
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…r, trying to grasp what religion seeks to accomplish in a more fundamental way. One might phrase it this way: What is the shared concern of religion evident beyond the explicit differences? It seems to me the answer is simple. Religion, at a fundamental level, is concerned with the search for life meaning—the effort to come to grips with the terrifying questions that confront us: Who are we? What are we? Does our existence matter? Rituals, doctrin…
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…hat brought most of the early Zionists to Zionism—but not all. There was always a dissenting minority who saw Zionism as a way to not merely save Jews but, more importantly, Judaism. They expected the Jewish homeland (not necessarily a political state, but necessarily in Palestine) to be a platform from which Jewish renewal would be launched. Proponents of a “spiritual Zionism,” like Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber, hoped for a new kind of Judaism, ma…
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…prevent conception, then it wasn’t “legitimate” rape; that is, she in some way colluded with her rapist.) To my mind, this is inconsistent with the way that gender, the erotic, and procreation figure in the theological tradition—which is not in itself problematic, but in this case turns out to be hugely problematic indeed, from a feminist perspective! There is something especially gratuitous in the offense. One could nonetheless discern possible i…
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…Gotanda said, “I think Obama is the first Asian-American president, in the way that Bill Clinton was the first black president. Obama’s personal history, the way he’s been treated, and the whole birther movement….only makes sense if you see it as sort of racialized in the Asian-American foreignness kind of way.” Gotanda, though, does see something new in Trump’s proposal. “What’s new is this kind of religious based—nominally religious based—exclus…
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