Religion Dispatches
…d especially its Muslims, are not entirely comfortable. Leadership at this point means finding a way out of this morass that does not cost us any more. I think the idea is good, but there is no vision. Show us that vision and get us all to buy into it. Right now a lot of people are fighting the fight against the vitriol this project has unleashed. Fighting against Islamophobia, fighting for the Constitution, is not the same as fighting for Park51….
Read More…human social cohesion and organization—groupwork, if you will. Whether you buy any of these theories or not, it’s hard to disagree with the assertion that religion is a profoundly social enterprise. Is there something inherently special about groups and how they think—something more than the sum of their individual members? As an educator and observer of learners, it makes intuitive sense to me that human groups have what scientists call ‘collecti…
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…er/their attention is directed elsewhere. If I were plotting to lead large numbers of Christian youth to their damnation, I would aim for something a bit more consequential than a single issue of Teen Vogue—with all respect for its circulation numbers. I mean, I would try for systemic corruption. It might be possible, for example, to render Christian teaching about sex so shrilly ridiculous that it provoked widespread ridicule. (Imagine what it wo…
Read More…hing I thought about on this trip. I made a last-minute effort to at least buy presents for my grandsons, who already have a quite a collection of T-shirts from various places, if not from the airports on the way out of those places. It’s one of those “thought that counts” kind of things: a way of sharing something from my time away with them. In the dream, one of the members of my tour group lands in the holy city with an inflatable Eiffel tower….
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…s is a bit like the Henry Ford argument that if everyone is paid enough to buy a car, I will sell more and my profits will go up. But does this hold generally? And more importantly, why should I care about the well-being of others if I can increase my own? This is precisely the debate we are having in America today. There are those, like myself, who think that even if the very rich do get a better quality of life than the rest of us—Mayor Bloomber…
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…e Chairman Ben Bernanke last week, in a speech attacking the Fed’s plan to buy up $600 billion in government debt to stimulate the US economy. While the plan known as “quantitative easing” has been, like all monetary policy, the subject of debate, Palin’s speech wasn’t disagreement so much as it was a rallying cry for Tea Partiers, and a reassertion the Christian Reconstructionist belief that the Fed is unbiblical. From the safe confines of Facebo…
Read More…im Mafia, the Fox report is largely guilt-by-association, conspiratorial claims. It’s the sort of red meat that resonates in the conservative culture that feeds on paranoia over a Muslim fifth column out to subvert the U.S. government. But will Minority Leader McConnell buy into the Fox panic, or will he bring some reason to bear to the conservative base’s Islamophobia? Will he feign concern that his very office—his computer system—is manned by so…
Read More…l revolution that meant no one had to buy the cow to get the milk, growing numbers of cohabiting couples, no-fault divorce, serial monogamy, and of course, the Pill for giving women control over their own bodies. While he doesn’t come right out and blame the gays for the decline in marriage, he does take a backhanded swipe at the marriage equality movement noting that “the concept of marriage as a sacred covenant has given way to the idea that mar…
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…e Christian denomination in which that person had been brought up, I would buy her a pint of beer. As luck would have it I was not broke at the subsequent revels. It turns out that he was not broke because no one took the bet. But the story points out a very interesting idea that Turner pursues in the course of his essay: The atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are often not more than mirror images—inversions—of the theisms they negate…
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…st (or at least strongly suggest) that some paths are wrong. Money doesn’t buy happiness, after all, but some routes to happiness are only accessible to the rich. Our culture is materialist and consumerist, but we can’t draw insights from other cultures without typecasting them. We’re aware that the concept of authenticity is a cultural construction, yet most of us can’t quite escape its power—or refrain from condemning those who seem to. But with…
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