Religion Dispatches
…re you wish you had written? Which one? Why? A recent book: Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers. She combines passion, intelligence, and a determination to beautifully tell a long-suppressed story. Also, I wish I had written a 150-year-old book: The Origin of Species. It’s marvelously written as well as being a scientific and philosophical masterpiece. What’s your next book? Living without God in Today’s America: Political Tasks for Secularists. Or The Bo…
Read More…nfamous kill-the-gays bill has been reintroduced in Parliament. The bill stalled last year in the face of international pressure, including condemnation from the U.S. State Department, but its backers have never given up. The legislation and the violent anti-gay rhetoric promoted by its supporters have been part of a wave of anti-gay campaigns in Africa backed by American anti-gay evangelicals. That campaign has had deadly consequences: just over…
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…ve, regardless of what it is. One way to describe what’s happening is that today there is a surplus of masculine purpose. Purposive energy exceeds the capacity to imagine what good purposes to put it to. This might help explain how men today might be drawn to causes that promise opportunities to express purpose. That is what ISIS offers. It is what vigilante occupation of government property offers. It is what “stand your ground” laws offer. It is…
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…ke Azerrad’s were mostly confined to relatively fringe alt-right podcasts. Today, they’ve been so mainstreamed they’re comfortable announcing them on the plenary stage. “America is a gynocracy”—male supremacy Declaring that “America today is a gynocracy,” Azerrad claims that it’s ruled, along with the rest of the West, by a “feminine spirit which is at war with almost all traditional expressions of masculinity.” Furthermore, “what the regime hates…
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…ation of its “no-gossip” policy. In fairness to Shellnutt and Christianity Today, highlighting this incident as an abuse of evangelical opposition to “gossip” is a good thing. In addition, Christianity Today should be acknowledged for calling for evangelicals to take accusations of sexual abuse seriously, when the magazine’s editors are highly aware that much of their readership will be inclined to dismiss rather than believe victims. That being s…
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…ege, and have written for mainstream Christian magazines like Christianity Today and Relevant. How would you describe your current relationship with evangelical Christianity, and how have these experiences living and working with refugees shaped that relationship? In some ways evangelicalism is just is a part of me, and I am comfortable using the insider language and in certain ways find it comforting to be around people who understand me in that…
Read More…are the Catholics in charge and women who want to participate equally are free to form their own church. I can assure him on good authority that the process of forming new models of church is well underway with Catholic women serving the needs of the world. I can also brief him on the fact that some of the nuns with whom he was speaking lead orders that include members who have lost so much respect for the institutional church that they barely ac…
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…und base underneath the town where alien experiments were undertaken, that free energy was possible if only the dark cabal hadn’t kept it from us to continue profiting from our labor, and that the banking system and wage labor were designed to keep us enslaved. Spirituality, they told me, was the route to freedom from these third dimensional machinations. The dark cabal wants to block spiritual evolution because it threatens their control. What’s…
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…re deemed inferior simply because they’re not adequate representations of “free” peoples’ cultures. Historically, “slave-shaming” Black American spiritual traditions meant, at best, affirming a moral equivalency between enslaved and free persons, so as to disavow the notion that oppressed people’s spiritual traditions were superior in value to the religious faiths of human traffickers. Take Hebrew Israelism, for example, the primary spiritual trad…
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…d were saddened and disturbed by Mister Rogers’s apparent unwillingness to free Shamu from the confines of the Sea World tank. The letters are very touching in the care they express for a killer whale in need of the freedom afforded by a vast ocean. They are also moving in the sense that they are the product of Rogers’s own creation—his handwork in encouraging children to express their feelings, including those of anger and disappointment. The let…
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