Religion Dispatches
…the ideas in the book, at least deeply suspicious about or don’t see much value in them. One thing I find valuable about Faitheist is that it moves atheism away from the kind of polemic that ends up focusing on truth claims in a very literal way and so mirrors the religious fundamentalisms it would like to dismantle. A few months ago, when we were together at an interfaith conference, I posed to you the question of whether American atheism as a m…
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…ago, Time magazine named him one of the twenty-five most influential conservative evangelical Christians in the country; he had a chair named in his honor at Calvin College, a small Christian college based in Grand Rapids, Michigan; for years he has had the ear of top-shelf Republican Party political leaders; and he has been a prolific author of books, writer/co-author of columns, and is regular host of a Christian radio news program. Receiving th…
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…rate how significant belief is for most people. We all know that there are varied influences on people’s identity, but for a time, there was the idea that religious belief was solely a stand-in for other interests. I simply think that idea is wrong. I want to be clear that I think that religious belief can be, and often is, intertwined with other things, but it is still a defining variable in establishing personal identity. On the other hand, ther…
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…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…
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…n outsized presence in American culture. That largely happened through innovation, including the Christian television talk show format, which Bakker pioneered with Pat Robertson at the Christian Broadcasting Network in the 1960s, PTL’s private satellite network, launched in 1978, a year before ESPN, and the theme park, Heritage USA. The Bakkers signature television show, the PTL Club, was broadcast live, five days a week, with little scripting. Ta…
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…” is a misnomer. The term obscures the fact that those identified as conservatives have varied more widely in views on national debt, religion, military excursions, the personal conduct of elected officials, political party affiliation and other putative conservative concerns than they have on the treatment of Black people. The through line of American conservatism has been the work towards the increased injury of Black people at each stage of U.S…
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…t based upon their biography. The careers of these three self-identifying evangelicals mirrored evangelicalism’s broader rise in American politics and culture in the 1970s, linking their professional success with their personal faith commitments. Marsden, for instance, taught for more than two decades at a small, conservative Dutch Reformed school before his pioneering work earned him positions at major research universities like Duke and Notre Da…
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…the Vampire, although these groups represent a minority of self-identified vampires. Many vampires even identify as Christians and atheists. Several people expressed concern for my safety while working with vampires. Several journalists who have written on the vampire community, all of them female, describe moments in which they were frightened or made to feel uncomfortable. One of them even employed a personal bodyguard. However, I never once had…
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…y influential in the United States, and that its “common mission” is to “advance shari’ah, to advance political Islam and the collectivism of a Muslim political movement in America that’s different from our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.” Spiritual Warfare and Multi-Level Marketing Against “Totalitarianism” In a video shown on the website of the Oak Initiative, a coalition of evangelical and charismatic clergy, Lt. General William G. “Jerry”…
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…
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