Religion Dispatches
…harist, it included a restatement of a prohibition of totally wheat-gluten-free hosts. This was often reported as something of a snub of the Celiac sufferers (or gluten intolerant) among the faithful. But reading through the directive and the supporting documentation, I was struck by their attempts to accommodate communicants who can’t tolerate some essential aspect of the rite. The bread for the host can be so low in gluten as to qualify for “glu…
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…ucts, Scheibeler, who had developed a business that extended from North America to Europe, South America, and the Philippines, met a number of politically powerful Republican politicians and conservative religious leaders, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Iran/Contra figure Oliver North, and then-Senator Rick Santorum. Religious leaders like Charles Stanley (a former distributor), Dr. Robert Schuller and the late Dr. D. James K…
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…rtain the answer is “no.” Look at the rich countries of Europe; look at America. They are free from material suffering, yet still they are suffering. Still, they don’t have peace. So what is needed on top of that is inner peace, inner joy, and compassion. Look at the problem from the reverse point of view: if we create inner peace, inner joy, and compassion, does that create world peace? No, because there are still people who are hungry; there are…
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…historian or sociologist could legitimately ask whether Christianity in America by its actual nature (not by its lofty claims) moves inextricably toward what we now have on the Republican side of Congress. But there is another way to see this moment, as the exposure of Christianity’s greatest counterfeit. I am not saying that the Republicans in Congress are not real Christians. Nor am I questioning the importance, commitment or legitimacy of their…
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…s or riding a bicycle so that you can charge your cell phone or blend your free smoothie, the spirit has that vibe, that playful spirit of early hope. Our skateboarder is ready to ride. Here you can see mushrooms growing out of logs injected with coffee grounds. Beautiful, edible oyster mushrooms. You can buy a nice meal in a glass dish, which is recycled. You can get a free recyclable cup to drink water out of a fountain. You can sign a climate r…
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…th-South dynamic is far more complex—there is cross-pollination these days between Christian traditions in the Global South and in the developed world, with African evangelicals aggressively moving to develop their own missions in Texas, Ukraine, Moscow, and elsewhere. The original Counter-Reformation did not originate in Europe’s developing colonial holdings but, rather, in the European Catholic Church. In similar fashion, most of the leaders and…
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…s. White nationalists will support protectionist measures, and they oppose free trade in capital goods because they oppose free trade (or open borders) for labor. Whether or not they gain traction by claiming that the stock market and banks are controlled by Jews depends on whether people of goodwill are able to offer a more compelling vision of change. With Obama in the White House, I think we can expect more of the same, plus some. Some white na…
Read More…heon points out, there is a danger that when we understand ourselves to be promoting pluralism, we are enforcing a tacit division between “good” and “bad” religions (what Leonard Primiano called a “two-tiered model of religion”). A recent example is the fracas that occurred last year when The Satanic Temple offered to re-enact a black mass as part of a Harvard cultural studies club. The Temple’s multicultural performance was quickly reinterpreted…
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…ce and freedom.” I don’t know if we Americans, especially Christians in America, want to be freed from our demons. The late New Testament scholar Walter Wink defined the demonic as an array of human and supra-human forces aligned to destroy life. The demonic was both individual and structural, personal and collective, sentient and mechanical. Wink’s expansive way of writing about the demonic sought to capture the dynamic interplay of our being opp…
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…ng any distinctive rights or obligations: bye-bye to the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the Constitution, etc. They might as well protect us from the “establishment” of widget and the “free exercise” thereof. Both are meaningless, since neither “widget” nor “religion” point to anything specific. Linker, on the other hand, takes the exact opposite tack: he legislates the meaning of “religion” as those particular referents marked by the…
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