Religion Dispatches
…r, of proving membership in the club and obedience to their leader. One who goes without a mask is a true believer who will risk it all. If it’s a good enough way to live, it’s also a good way to die. “And these signs shall follow them that believe.”…
Read More…appropriate vocabulary for talking about non-Muslim French privilege, the way so many are now able to discuss white privilege in America? When Valls asserts that the French State is “neutral,” it sounds a lot like the way white skin in America has been normalized, while black and brown skin is marked. A woman’s bare head in France is no more neutral than white skin in the U.S. Bare-headedness has a history, one that triumphs in France at the expe…
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…m. But Lieberman’s willingness to confront the matter directly went a long way toward defusing the issue. Romney should take a lesson from Lieberman. Indeed, the real lesson of presidential politics over the past half century is that Americans expect some expression of faith from their presidential candidates—think of Michael Dukakis, whom Garry Wills identified as America’s first truly secular candidate for president, as a counter-example—and we…
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…caust. Ultimately, it’s about who gets to commit violence in a permissible way, and it’s always the nation. That violence can be directed at other nations, or to internal populations. One simply has to look at a film like Birth of a Nation to see how this works. The way in which police tactics are used against black bodies in America is enabled by Enlightenment thinking in the sense that it’s a reflection of the different ideas of who is truly a c…
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…dire consequences for women and LGBT people? Or was the movement simply a way for men to build deeper and more caring relationships with God, and with each other, making them better husbands and fathers along the way? Was it both? Promise Keepers’ wave probably crested on October 4, 1997, at its “Stand in the Gap” rally on the Mall in the Capitol. Between half a million to a million men (depending on who was counting) showed up. Of course PK judg…
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…sive wealth for a few on the labor of poor and enslaved people. In so many ways—ways that powerful empires always work—we Americans are the Romans in the Jesus story. We believe and act in similar ways with similar justifications. It’s the essence of “Empire” thinking. This simple change in emphasis illuminated so many things for me that evening, and in the years since, that they completely changed the way I read and thought about the Jesus storie…
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…can be of mutual benefit. As a journalist, I’ve found that epoché is rule number one for reporting among people different from you. Lawyers often have to do something similar. It’s a basic part of how business works. For much of history, traders, rather than scholars, have led the way to discovering foreign cultures. Christians and Muslims were trading with each other during the Crusades, and Marco Polo made it to China centuries before Matteo Ri…
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…e “innocence” of Catholic girls. That works in the narrative because its a way to suggest they are easy prey. And it’s fairly misogynistic in many ways. That’s part of the film too, despite how it’s obviously subversive. His name isn’t Adrian, by the way. It’s Andrew John Woodhouse. Which brings me to the end of the story. The book goes on a bit more when Rosemary meets Andy for the first time. She begins to cluck over him, and accepts him as her…
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…f they haven’t adequately kept astride with the march of progress. In this way, as the authors contend, modernization entails a progressive movement away from “supernatural belief” towards “natural sciences” as the basis for individual action and social organization. While some people may choose to hold on to traditional religiosity for aesthetic and sentimental reasons—because religions tell comforting stories, inspire great works of art, and kni…
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…ofessions,” as historian John Hope Franklin had explained. And it became a way to take the beauty and power away from one of the most successful social movements of the twentieth century and the vision it offers us for today. The recounting of national histories is never separate from present-day politics. What of the past is remembered, celebrated, and mourned is at the core of national identity—and the process of what is told and not told is oft…
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