Religion Dispatches
…capital being used on this project, its failure would set the community in New York, if not the country, back generations. For it to succeed at this point means allowing a project to go forward with which New Yorkers, and 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 u…
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…bail” until further notice, expected to return to court at any time for a new trial, pending new evidence. The cloud of accusation, and the threat of incarceration, might be allowed to hang over them indefinitely. But hung juries aside, there are reasons why we don’t do that. In the face of uncertainty, we think it is better to err on the side of letting the guilty go free than on the side of shattering the lives of the innocent. And so, even if…
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…’t practice family values. But he promised to fight for a world they once knew, where men were men and women knew their place; a world where white Christians enjoyed a cultural supremacy that seems to be slipping away. If that’s where ‘family values’ leads white evangelicals—to support an amoral narcissist—perhaps evangelicals would have been better off reading the whole Bible literally. Then they would at least believe that, like the rich man in…
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…if people agreed with me or not, which for me was huge. So there I was, a newly non-polemicist with a very polemical book! I asked my publisher if I could scrap the whole thing and start from scratch, and thankfully they agreed. Misfit Faith is the result. As far as the inspiration for it goes, I have always taken great comfort in G.K. Chesterton’s insistence that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” I have never felt like I’m any good at…
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…mon’s book Wagner writes, “Just as the 1980s was a decade initiating the renewal of the Biblical gift and the office of prophet, the 1990s is shaping up to be the decade in which God is renewing the gift and office of apostle.” Hamon had previously identified the 1950s as the decade of the evangelist; the 1960s as the decade of pastors; and the 1970s as the decade of teachers. Following this gradual introduction, the church’s capacity for the five…
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…igious sentiment lined up on this question on account of my own efforts in New York to call out then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s especially cruel version of “welfare reform” during the Clinton years, once Clinton had muscled through his Reagan-inflected “personal responsibility” bill in 1996. I was roundly denounced by ostensibly progressive clergy colleagues—and by several ostensibly liberal newspaper columnists—for getting my morals wrong; these disti…
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…hose terms. The idea is that instead of trying to defend the goal that the new atheists are trying to score against, I’m standing on the sidelines defending the water cooler and shouting “missed again!” every time a new atheist kicks one straight into the net. But I think this analogy tells us more about the current state of the so-called “God debates” than it does about anything else. It seems to me that far too many people treat these debates as…
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….” One of the things we can do is call them out on that. You propose seven new deadly sins and seven new amazing graces—what are they? The core of my book is to move from this crime-based model of sin to a Christ-centered model of sin, and it’s not some kind of newfangled thing. As someone who teaches early church history, I’m trying to draw on this alternative strand of thinking about salvation and grace and God’s love and Christ infusing divinit…
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…ionality of anti-Semitic conspiracism has historically allowed Jews to be scapegoated as the “hidden puppeteers” behind both socialism and capitalism. Since the 2008 financial crisis when the “globalist” canard and scapegoating of George Soros made their way into the discourse we’ve seen Jews blamed for the depredations of vulture capitalism and the finance sector even as, bizarrely, this same Jewish cabal is somehow deemed “socialist” as well. An…
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…it he highlights the signal role Hughes, his predecessor as archbishop of New York, played in the establishment of the Catholic school system in America. Hughes first “struggled to rid the New York public schools in the 1840s of their anti-Catholic bias,” but then went on to found an independent Catholic school system to preserve the faith of future Catholics. Dolan acknowledges in his article that a number of other Catholic bishops shared this c…
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