Religion Dispatches
…to identify myself within a queer narrative was the fact that there were a number of different narratives available to me. Identifying as an atheist, I went through a similar process, but there weren’t the same range of narratives. And I kept meeting other atheists who felt the same way I did—who felt like their identities and their stories weren’t represented in the most dominant atheist narratives. How would you characterize narrative American…
Read More
…figure. In response to news of the award ceremony, I wrote a piece for Buzzflash entitled “The Fallen Have Risen: Charles Colson honored by White House,” and subtitled “In his final days in office, President Bush is pallin’ around with a former felon and bomb plotter.” Despite the snarky subtitle’s intentional dig at Bush, the article acknowledged Colson’s recent achievements: A few years ago, Time magazine named him one of the twenty-five most in…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…sed, if my sister’s mark of culture must be repressed, then we are not the flesh of Christ. For, it is through and in Christ’s own flesh that the ‘other’ is my sister, is my brother; indeed, the ‘other’ is me… If anti-gay bullying is a theological issue, perhaps what is called for is a creative theological response. A theological response that challenges the systematic violence that upholds an oppressive religious and cultural ideology will not be…
Read More
…haracters—Jim and Tammy Bakker, Richard Dortch, David Taggart, John Wesley Fletcher, and of course Jessica Hahn—seem almost too improbable for a novel. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Entertain them? Piss them off? All of the above! The story ranges from sincere faith to fraud, secret affairs, and the allure of television cameras. I interviewed dozens of people for the book, some of whom thought PTL was the best thing they had ever been inv…
Read More
…damentally post-racist country, the racists “are just a few idiots,” not a number tallied in the millions. In “conservatism,” the intellectual legacy of the Confederacy has been normalized and an entire population of Negrophobes is absorbed into society and allowed space to push their anti-Black agenda everywhere from the Senate floor to bank cubicles. It’s been said that politics is the continuation of war by other means. After the surrender at A…
Read More
…of the whole. Noll even ends the collection with yet another metaphorical flourish, suggesting that scholars no longer think of evangelicalism as a religious “World Series,” where events in the United States determine a victor, but as a “World Cup,” where an international diversity of teams are on display. 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 t…
Read More
…that some readers may be “awakening” themselves, and that this book may influence the continuing emergence of this community. It is naïve for a modern ethnographer to imagine that their research “leaves no footprints.” Finally, I think that the family, friends, and neighbors of vampires may find this book helpful. I increasingly encountered stories of people learning that their significant other was a vampire and spouses who were confused by thei…
Read More
…te being shunned at CPAC, Gaffney’s views are shared by Rep. Allen West (R-FL), chosen by CPAC to give its closing keynote address, an honor that in the past has been bestowed on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Adding to his numerous inflammatory statements about Islam, West recently said that the values of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), who is Muslim, are the “antithesis of the principles on which this country was established.” West, whose position on…
Read More…uslims. A cycle is created between reporting on religion as a source of conflict and those who want to make religion a source of conflict. I marvel at the fact that seven years after 9/11 the US media doesn’t understand how complicit it is in supporting this cycle of violence. A short course on Islam may have been a poor ROI before, but now it seems like a necessity. In England, an avowed atheist, writes almost 2 years after the London subway bomb…
Read More