Religion Dispatches
…th his sexuality, leaves Christianity for atheism, and goes to theology school where he joins the movement for interfaith justice… as an atheist. It is the story of Christopher Stedman, who at 25 years old is now assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University and a surprising and influential new voice in the interfaith justice movement and American atheism. Stedman models an atheism that while uncompromising in its principles is also warm towar…
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…groundwork for a return to the Motherland. Founded in 1959 by two high school buddies from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Richard DeVos and the late Jay Van Andel, Amway—short for “American Way”—peddled all sorts of products including health, beauty, and household items. These days, Nutrilite, which the company calls “the world’s leading brand of vitamin, mineral and dietary supplements,” is one of the company’s leading moneymakers. The company’s most i…
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Historian Colin Chapell’s latest book explores gender in the South through the lens of the Holiness movement. What inspired you to write Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him? I am fascinated by the ways in which people’s religious beliefs change how they see and understand the world around them. Of course, to the faithful, this is axiomatic—they expect their faith to change their worldview. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, I had not seen many scholar…
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…with each successive news story about another gay teen hanging himself, shooting himself, or jumping off a bridge. As I saw the faces of these young victims and imagined the family and friends left to cope with the chaos created by their suicides, my lamentation began to morph into an indignant fury. My indignation grew as I shifted my gaze from the individual acts of suicide to the contexts in which these suicides are set. Suicide happens for nu…
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…ious devotion become so entwined with money, sex, and celebrity on a Hollywood scale? A short synopsis might help: Jim and Tammy started the PTL network with half a dozen employees in a former furniture store in 1974. By 1986 PTL had annual revenues of $129 million, 2500 employees, a 2300-acre theme park, Heritage USA, and a private satellite network that reached into fourteen million homes in the US. That year, six million people visited Heritage…
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…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 Appomattox, acolytes of anti-Black torture culture—Southerners as well as Northerners—continued the war to keep their boots on Black necks on the beaches and landing grounds of law and policy. White nationalists put on a hat reading conservative—or, in contem…
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…eritable cottage industry of editorials, hot takes, and academic research took shape that aimed to account for this supposedly astonishing fact. Setting aside attempts to “downplay and complicate” evangelical support, journalists found that nostalgia for an imagined pre-Civil Rights America drew many evangelicals to Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” while pollsters discovered that a form of Christian nationalism anchors the political…
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…ls as well as reporters. It was Praeger who approached me about writing a book. They had noticed a heightened interest in vampires in the wake of Twilight and the Charlaine Harris novels—phenomena I was completely ignorant of at the time. Through the AVA, I began to find more contacts throughout the country and throughout the world. As it turns out, there are many groups of people who consider themselves to be ontologically different from normal h…
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…as a “season of singular national distemper where, for reasons best understood by social psychiatrists, the American people have entered into what can only be described as ‘open season’ on Islam.” The conspiracy theorists succeed by using self-styled, unqualified “experts” to stoke fears of secret plots of Muslims to take over America and replace its Constitution with shari’ah law. That they even point to shari’ah, says Lena Salaymeh, a Harvard-tr…
Read More…ne by Zarifmo Aslamshoyeva and one by Reza Aslan; OnFaith had a piece by Eboo Patel. There was no other national coverage I could find, although local coverage was fairly good, such as this piece from a Houston Chronicle blog. Aslamshoyeva’s piece focused on the meaning of the Aga Khan as both religious leader and philanthropist (CNN article, AKDN Web site). It was a moving piece on nature of hope and belief. Aslan’s post focuses mostly on the cha…
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