Religion Dispatches
As David Cook prepared for his victory on the latest season of American Idol, the Republican state chairwoman of Georgia was engaged in paying reverence to a different type of American idol. In a bizarre moment in the world of mixing religion and politics, Sue Everhart compared Republican presidential candidate John McCain to Jesus and America to God. Addressing McCain’s patriotism and devotion to America even while being tortured as a prisoner o…
Read More
…of words—as thoroughly test-marketed as a Viagra commercial—represents the latest in a decades-long series of efforts by religious conservatives to thwart the steady advance of public acceptance of gays and lesbians into the mainstream of American life. According to an analysis of polling data published by CBS News, Americans are becoming more “gay friendly” at a rate of about one percent a year. Still, that means that only 45 percent of Californi…
Read More…ed as “uppity” according to the rules of the racial lexicon. Moreover, the latest media frenzy seems to prove that Senator Obama is in a no-win situation in terms of Rev. Wright. Despite Senator Obama’s public denouncements of his former pastor, many argued that the senator’s protestations were little more than a smokescreen. But now Rev. Wright has made it clear that the pastor/parishioner relationship ends in the church vestibule. Wright even de…
Read More…provide. It seems to me that the confusion over how best to respond to the latest revelations of corporate greed—AIG executives awarded some of their own in excess of 160 million dollars in executive bonuses—might be analyzed most helpfully with Weber’s categories. On the face of it, this looks for all the world like the violation of authentic prophecy. The people who are being rewarded are the same people who ran the company into the ground. Thes…
Read More…t kinds of programs they should create for the former slaves, based on the latest survey data. And the wilderness wouldn’t be made out of desert sand and sagebrush, but of Yoga studios, rock clubs, and intermarriage: all of the temptations of the American cultural marketplace. The leaders, on some level, would have long ago realized that they had to lead by following, or be left behind. If nothing else, this “spirituality” survey indicates that Je…
Read More…time of war. This may well be why the president is taking so long to commit himself to a new strategy in Afghanistan. He is trying to re-imagine what that war is about, against whom it is being waged, and what its new purposes are, once we stop imagining it as “the latest front in a global war on terror.” That requires imagination, as well as determination and strength of purpose. This Guantanamo decision is thus perhaps the first step toward the…
Read More
…ist plots involving anti-matter bombs, there’s little reason to expect his latest work to be factually reliable. Perhaps it shouldn’t need to be, except for Brown’s prefatory note claiming that “all organizations in this novel exist,” and “all rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.” As a student of Freemasonry, I can vouch that Brown’s claim is generally true. The strange rituals and traditions that the novel attributes t…
Read More…ch sent the following letter in response to Bruce Lawrence’s review of his latest book. In it, Prof. Lawrence wrote that Dying for Heaven is a “bizarrely casual, yet deeply serious, treatise,” adding that, “the thesis of the book itself would be a laughing matter were the author not intent on altering the way that the defense establishment—and not just academics or scholars of religion—think about ‘holy pleasure.’” Prof. Glucklich writes: Dying fo…
Read More
…ection of short stories. She is also New York’s official State Author. Her latest book, Reading Jesus, brings a writer’s eye to the narrative focal point of the Christian scriptures, the four Gospels. After a lifetime struggling with her Catholic faith (and her father’s abandoned Judaism), Gordon turned to these texts more resolutely than she ever had before. What she found there is messy and contradictory, far from the packaged certainties of rad…
Read More
…C) from the very beginnings of the denomination: their holiness and purity codes in the early 20th century forbade the processing or pressing of hair (like Madam C.J. Walker’s revolutionary hair-straightening process.) As the denomination grew in cities during the 1940s, straight hair became the currency of charismatic authority and power for the church mothers and pastors’ wives. Lighter skin, straighter hair, and European features became a preci…
Read More