Religion Dispatches
…I tried to be careful to not say that my way is the best way forward for anyone—atheist or not. Whenever someone decides they have discovered the best way and that other people should walk the same path, it’s a real turn-off. Atheist polemicists have done a lot to raise the visibility of atheists, but they haven’t made atheism all that attractive for many people and part of the reason why that is—fairly or unfairly—is that they’ve been presented…
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…ing brand of vitamin, mineral and dietary supplements,” is one of the company’s leading moneymakers. The company’s most important product has always been selling its version of the American Dream: the notion that any person with a fair amount of desire, spunk, and initiative with a get-up-and-go persona and a little bit of up-front money, could shape their futures. They can get rich, and their futures would include a fair amount of well-deserved w…
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…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…
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…hostage situation, we would have dispatched the SWAT team by now. And in many ways, it is. Our children and teenagers are being held hostage by a religious and political rhetoric that strives to maintain the status quo of anti-gay heterosexist normativity. The messages of Focus on the Family and other organizations actively strive to leave the most vulnerable among us exposed to continuous attack. The good news is that we don’t need a SWAT team. W…
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…es some of Jim and Tammy’s appeal. PTL was all about images so there were any number of options. Too bad books can’t come with a dozen different covers to choose from. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? I love the writing style of Lawrence Wright and Hampton Sides. They are both masters at weaving nonfiction into a page-turner. Anything half as good would be fine with me. What’s your next book? I’m not sure yet. Ho…
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…ween the history of American conservatism and anti-Black racism would buy any bridge. They would hear conservatives out when they claim that South Africa’s or Kenya’s richest farmland ended up in white hands because of the “white work ethic” or that Reconstruction’s Black farms found today in white pockets got there fair and square. They will believe that the reason Harriett Tubman’s image will not appear on U.S. currency as planned is that the cu…
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…s to be evangelical and what that term means to them. There’s a certain irony here, in that an Anglophone movement that once saw itself as uniquely positioned to save the world is now looking to the globe to salvage its reputation. ‘Evangelical’ as metaphor Noll, Marsden, and Bebbington have each retired in recent years, making Evangelicals something of a testament to their centrality to the field. The text concludes with a new essay from each edi…
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…ed in whether the subjective experiences described by vampires are “real” any more than I would be interested in empirically questioning a Christian’s experience of the Holy Spirit. But there were still many obstacles to navigate regarding the metaphysical claims of vampires. Of particular controversy was the existence of subtle energy or “psi,” which many vampires claim to feed on. Some of the vampires were quick to point out that I could not rea…
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…is claim of Islam’s incompatibility with democracy has nothing to do with anything historical, or anything in legal texts.” The cottage industry, she says, points to some aspects of Wahhabism, such as requirements on dress codes, and portray that as representative of Islamic thought. “The problem is, I don’t think that they understand that Islamic law means different things to different people in different places. None of these Wahhabi interpretat…
Read More…e the Isma’ilis, making them the main group. The point is that there are many ways to claim superiority, but the reality is most Muslims have lived with various other communities of interpretation. The rhetoric of conflict now permeates our discourse on religion. Once religion is framed in conflict, it must always be presented that way. When a man who leads a large Muslim community, is believed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad, and who de…
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