Religion Dispatches
…CUFI Board Member Gary Bauer, Daniel Pipes, former senator Rick Santorum, Charles Jacobs of the David Project, Dennis Prager, William Kristol, Israel’s US ambassador Sallai Meridor, AIPAC’s Brad Gordon, and Senator Joseph Lieberman. Despite pleas not to attend the Washington meeting from a number of organizations, including the newly-formed Jewish group J Street (which has partnered with Democracy for America in an effort called “Say It Ain’t So,…
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…r him, go back to the early American revivalists like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney. They preached a Jesus of the frontier: muscular, self-reliant, and terse with words. Then comes a sequence of prosperity preachers and cowboy evangelists who have never ceased to capture American hearts. The master narrative arrives all the way at the door of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the megachurch that Sharlet infiltrated for a gripping 2005 fea…
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…slums of Chicago; Josiah Strong, founder of the League of Social Services; Charles Sheldon, author of the 1896 novel In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?; and now Barack Obama, who long ago left community organizing for Harvard Law, there to join America’s anointed, meritocrats who rule because they’re better at it than you. The Social Gospel grew out of a 19th century movement known as “muscular Christianity” that began in England as a response to…
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…ave a weakness for plagiarism, or an Episcopalian may have a hankering for Charles Keating’s cash. These aren’t exceptions in the study of religion, they are the rules. Men and women believe even as they struggle, relentlessly, to behave. So when I say that John McCain may not believe in God, I do so with serious thought, and with no small indifference. It matters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doe…
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…esentations of Black Religion. In part, this would have been my tribute to Charles H. Long, whose work has influenced my own. In this case I would have been signifying on Long’s analytic category of “opacity” that he uses to characterize the experiences of black people in America. How do you feel about the cover? I like the cover. I would like the cover even more had it been red, black, and green: the colors of Marcus Garvey’s flag. Over the years…
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…ul as they may be, are most often those backed up by dedicated publicists. Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age, for instance, one of only two nonfiction titles about religion featured on The New York Times’ 2008 100 Notable Books list, is the kind of very dense, academic study that normally wouldn’t even cross the Times’ radar. But it’s big, it’s the culmination of a career, and its publisher, Belknap/Harvard University, put all of its consi…
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…who diverge from the views of the magisterium are excluded. One thinks of Charles Curran, Hans Kung, Roger Haight. Think of the feminists, some in Canada, made utterly invisible. Rosemary Ruether’s response to small-mindedness is to write another bestselling book. This time, in late 2008, it is Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican. You bet it doesn’t. In just 142 pages, six chapters, with not a wasted word, Ruether lays out once again her critique…
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…ed 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 Kennedy of Florida’s Coral Ridge Ministries—a multimedia, m…
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Everybody needs to sit back and relax. In this anniversary year of both Charles Darwin’s birth and his magnum opus, we shall surely hear even more than usual about this brilliant and thinking man whose ideas changed the world forever. Let’s celebrate and learn from him, whether we agree with him or not, rather than use his ideas as kindling for the ‘the culture wars between science and religion.’ I know: kindling and fires sell books—but let’s re…
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…or my daughter’s college education. Seriously, I wish I could have written Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those magisterial books about history that has become part of history. Books like that happen once in a generation. Sigh. What’s your next book? It is on a less-than cheerful subject—the decline of Christianity in the West. I’m wondering what forms Christianity will take, and what wisdom it will bear, as its hold on its ancestral…
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