Religion Dispatches
…atched with sandpaper or maybe it was just because he seemed to love everything—his wife, his kids, his bike, helping other people. I never asked the guy his name. He didn’t ask mine, but I still remember his thin face, his skinny legs, his red bandana and his wild gray hair to this day. So to answer your question, I wanted to tell a good story—a spooky story because what my family and I went through was spooky…and I wanted to share the love. What…
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…Betsy DeVos grew up in the Christian Reformed Church and attended its flagship seat of higher learning, Calvin College in nearby Grand Rapids. Rizga notes that the Christian Reformed body broke away from the much older Reformed Church in America roughly ten years after “seceding” Dutch Calvinists first arrived in numbers to settle in Western Michigan, Northwestern Iowa, and a few other chilly enclaves. These “seceders” were unhappy that the Dutch…
Read More…s-Willard. And when it comes to humans, a man tends to have about as many children as another man, and about as many children as a woman has. Stories of sultans with 900 children notwithstanding, humans are generally characterized by a much lower variance in male reproductive fitness than other closely related species, because of the institution of marriage. Once again, without the “if” statement, there is no “then” statement. Those who have tried…
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…Good Death in ways we haven’t imagined or prepared for. In a class I’m teaching at Chicago Theological Seminary called “A Practical Theology of the Corpse,” I asked my students to describe their notion of a Good Death in the 21st Century. They said the kinds of things you’d probably say, too, if you took a moment to think about the question: dying peacefully and without pain (or at least with well-managed pain), dying in old age, dying at home, dr…
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…nally who have been involved, and I think that needs to continue. I don’t think this is a time when clergy can just sit by and only preach sermons and feel that is the extent of their involvement. On the other hand, I recognize that not all clergy can be on the ground, but if they can lend their support to the movement they ought to do that. This a matter of justice, and clergy ought to be at the forefront of any justice movement. Following the ac…
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…fricans, by 1810 the term was also being applied to Native Americans. And while a number of enlightened whites believed that the natives of this continent had nobler natures than white people, the problem (again) was that they had been rendered dependent and degraded via their corrupting interactions with lower-class Europeans. Absent an aggressive program of “civilizing” these people, they could not be permitted to remain living cheek-by-jowl wit…
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…sider religious and nonreligious experience today in light of an emerging philosophical and practical in-between pointed to by the growth in the number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I need to believe in God to say t…
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…eligious culture—those moments are utterly implicated in a human spiritual history of poaching, ivory trade, colonialism, human-wildlife farm conflicts, and big game hunting in Africa. With my hand still resting on this young elephant’s coarse skin, her forehead pressing into my palm, I cannot help but reply under my breath, knowing it cannot be the final question, “What right do we have to learn from you?” And yet the demand is that we must in th…
Read More…of the supposed separation between church and state. Others who tended to this historic forum felt the whole conversation was largely uneventful as both candidates provided predictable answers to easy questions from Rev. Rick Warren. Obama was characteristically thoughtful and articulate in his attempt to woo undecided conservative evangelicals while McCain was a bit dry and less thoughtful, yet somehow more direct as he played on his evangelical…
Read More…als under the Barna Group’s theological-based classification questions. Within this grouping, 61% voted for McCain and 38% went with Obama. In non-born-again categories, a higher proportion of voters identify themselves as either Democrats (44%) or independents (24%), and one-quarter of the non-born- again group (27%) as Republicans. Non-Christians overwhelmingly voted Obama/Biden—62% to 36%—numbers that surpassed the group’s 20-point margin for J…
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