Religion Dispatches
…lity courses, yoga courses, or zen courses, but none of those things would free the person to be like a child of God. Only the Holy Spirit, according to Francis, has the power to break the hardness of the heart and make it docile toward God and free to love. Given the frequent Catholic and evangelical yogaphobic moments in recent history, I asked myself if the Pope’s remarks were yogaphobic, but I concluded that yogaphobia did not appear to be at…
Read More
…At other tables, representatives from policy-oriented think tanks like American Compass, Center for Renewing America, and the Claremont Institute—as well as Project 2025 and Christian Zionist outfit Philos Project—speak to passersby. American Moment, a staffing outfit connecting young national conservatives with Capitol Hill jobs, offer free nitro cold brew while its representatives promote their ‘energetic’ movement of far-right operatives eager…
Read More
…as follows: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Tempting as it might be to explore the reason why “Militia” and “State” and “Arms” are capitalized but “the people” are not, I want to emphasize what seems critical to the invocation of the Second Amendment by the NRA. They focus on the conclusion, and ignore the reasoning which led to it. The…
Read More
…ncouraging to see national figures like Seidel, author most recently of American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom, join the fight for LGBTQ justice at the grassroots level where the key battles are fought. If you talk to young people involved in movement secularism, it’s clear that they see racial, women’s and LGBTQ issues as secular concerns and church-state issues, and that they want secular advocacy to focus on th…
Read More
…all the answers. Rather, in light of human tragedy, humanists might offer better questions during these challenging times, as well as a space for wrestling with these questions free of cosmic justifications—and a God clearly missing in action. I write this not to deny comfort for those who have been directly and indirectly touched by this unspeakable act of violence. Mine is an effort to acknowledge and respect grief without so quickly pushing t…
Read More
…entalism: each could be critiqued by a post-ideological social liberalism, free of the historical weight of Marxism. But the problem was that such a critique, while directed at those who would anathematize Islam and Muslims, seemed to apply to Islam and Muslims too. In both the West and in Muslim-majority countries, whether in support of jihadi violence or in more carefully faithful retrievals of Islamic sources, Muslims by and large expressed adh…
Read More
…g to bow to them, instead creating a new holy space where the oppressed go free. What better moment to consider our place as faithful Christians than during this season of Advent? In a time when American Christianity has perhaps sold its soul for 30 pieces of silver, taking refuge in the security of a violent empire, we would do well to remember that our good news first came as an act of divine protest in the body of a poor, brown baby born in a b…
Read More
…agedy, but it exists in uneasy relation to morality. Comic artists must be free to offend, free to be mean. This doesn’t mean that there should be no restriction on what the comedian can say, by the way; not at all. Comedians, like all artists, need constraints in order to show off their creative virtuosity. It is the audiences that need to restrain themselves; they need to permit themselves a laugh. Or not. The question, then, is not whether it w…
Read More…inciple. As I wrote at the time, Romney had a conundrum: needing to defend free exercise of religion (an in particular, his religion), but realizing that the Republican base demands the “Judeo-Christian” answer. Given that many conservative evangelicals don’t even think Romney’s religion is part of Christianity, when he gave the “Judeo-Christian” answer last night I cringed—because he didn’t balance it with a free exercise answer. In other words,…
Read More
…again. In this latest episode, according to bloggers at Hot Air and the American Conservative, “[t]he Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that a priest must testify in a case about what he heard in a confessional,” and “Fr. Bayhi will have to go to jail to protect the seal of the confessional.” These pundits can, to some extent, be forgiven for these misleading statements since the Catholic Church’s Baton Rouge Diocese has made some fairly alarming…
Read More