Religion Dispatches
…uses other than theology on hand for science’s development and sustenance. Europe and North America in the latter half of the second millennium had social arrangements, natural resources, habits of mind, and geopolitical competition that make for satisfying just-so stories too; only the most theologically self-confident would chalk it all up to religion. The globalization of science now underway, particularly as more and more important research ta…
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…ence over the German princes to commit near genocide of Catholics all over Europe during the 30 Years War. Catholics in the third Crusade almost exterminated the Orthodox church in Constantinople. Anabaptists have been drowned, burned, and exiled under each of the other major sects. For almost 1500 years, Christians wielded political power to slay one another; until the founding of America. America was the first country without a designated faith,…
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…out the religious thoughts and lives of the men and women who went over to Europe to wage the war. This is one instance of a broader problem that spans any historical discipline—certain voices, usually those of the powerful, are recorded and comparatively easy to study; other voices, those to whom the powerful are often speaking, are not—and it seemed to me that we should care whether and how soldiers theologized their involvement in a conflict th…
Read More…and the decline of the “traditional family.” Frequently cited is “secular” Europe where the religious right claims that the decline of Christianity has caused a population crisis and a looming “demographic winter.” This is a world where abortion is murder, but not only that: as RD contributor Kathryn Joyce detailed in her book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, God has a divine plan for the family, and anything that deviates fr…
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…Born in Africa, he took advantage of his athletic skill to move to wealthy Europe at age 14, where the best footballers are treated like gods and paid even better. He’s the highest paid player in Italian club football, but but when he was traded from Real Madrid to Barcelona he told the press corps, “I mean to run like a black man so I can live like a white one.” This year the tournament takes place in South Africa. It’s imagined to be that countr…
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…el, a younger state, there is a tradition of political engagement that its European founders brought with them to Palestine. As in Europe and Latin America, Israel’s most prominent writers are also public intellectuals, and some of them have voiced passionate objection to their government’s actions; most recently against the attack on the flotilla. But the main reason we don’t hear dissident Israeli voices is that there are many powerful forces wh…
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…in particular, drew on vampire lore to describe an interloper from Eastern Europe who comes to prey upon Victorian Londoners. Interestingly, War of the Worlds (1898), the first alien invasion narrative, was published one year after Dracula. But the vampire does not just invade our world; it walks among us to invade our bodies, our autonomy, and our very identities. The loss of identity is a perennial threat in Doctor Who that is reinforced symboli…
Read More…State claimed that homosexuality, not celibacy, was the cause of the high number of pedophilia cases in the Church. The Vatican issued a long overdue policy Monday that bishops must report sex abuse cases, but it did not impose a zero tolerance policy similar to what is in place in the U.S. Focus on the Family was for the possibility of a gay Supreme Court nominee before they were against it. Televangelist Joyce Meyer condemned the Uganda Anti-Ga…
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…a moral dimension. The epitome of toxic darkness, Nazi barbarism, plunged Europe into total war, shredding the classic liberal picture of a benign, individualistic society. Niebuhr derided the liberal idea that democracy fulfilled an ideal that people deserved on account of their moral worth. The children of darkness understood that will-to-power drives politics and history. This dialectic yielded Niebuhr’s most famous epigram, which the film fea…
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…ton was only 16 years old when he was orphaned. He traveled extensively in Europe, wandered for awhile, then spent two years at Clare College, Cambridge, before transferring to Columbia University, where he graduated in 1938 with a degree in English. Although the seeds for this were clearly sown in 1933 when he paid a decisive visit to Rome, Thomas Merton somewhat surprisingly converted to Roman Catholicism in November of 1938. Less than two years…
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