Religion Dispatches
…e abstract and conceptual rejection of God, it would seem that that the God-concept is still functionally alive for atheists. Perhaps. I think that may be the case for many atheists who rank their atheist identity high on the list of ways in which they’d describe themselves. But I suspect that the silent majority of non-theists, who could perhaps be described as “apatheists”—people not engaged in the atheist movement, who are largely apathetic ab…
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…exposing deadly “witch” hunters in Africa to the discovery of perhaps half-a-million Iberian Jews, no one does it better than Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, an absolute must-read for those following religious happenings in the United States and around the globe. Consider the following recent posts, produced by Richard Bartholomew: A report about a libel suit by one John F. Singer, a 49-year-old Queens, New York, man who claims that Centropa (th…
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…tten? Which one? Why? I think most academic historians want to write a best-selling, Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize-winning work with the prose skills of Michael Chabon! I don’t know if there’s a specific book out there that I wish I had written. For me, I want to improve my craft all the time. That being said, Gail Bederman’s Manliness & Civilization and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Barbarian Virtues are two of the most influential books for me, so I’d h…
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…white lines that are drawn between conceptions of good and evil make it all-too-easy to apply these dualisms to groups of people. When theologies leave no room for ambiguity, mystery and uncertainty, it becomes very easy to identify an “us” (good, heterosexual) versus a “them” (evil, gay). Additionally, hierarchical conceptions of value and worth are implicit in many of our theological notions. Needless to say, value and worth are not distributed…
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…ve days a week, with little scripting. Tammy once did an episode on a merry-go-round. One cast member threw up in the dog costume he was wearing as they spun round and round, all on live television. At the time it all seemed fresh and, for many, exciting. The sex and financial shenanigans were only interesting because of the size of PTL’s cultural footprint. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I have written dense academic works…
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…d nothing more. They, it’s believed, have long renounced the apartheid, pro-slavery and ethno-state dreams of earlier generations, but see no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. The fact that anti-Black white nationalist organizing during Reconstruction “was necessarily secret since open opposition of any kind would be considered rebellion,” however, should mean that no declaration of a ‘coming to Jesus’ moment on race by today’s conse…
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…gton’s famed Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, wherein he laid out his four-part description of evangelicals noted above. This view became the field’s prevailing paradigm, as the remaining reprints of the book’s first part make clear. An old Noll article on social survey data, a recent etymology of the term “evangelical” by historian Linford Fisher, and a roundtable commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Evangelicalism in Modern Britain fro…
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…here a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? Yes, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volumes I & II by Christopher Partridge. I first discovered Partridge because he has written on the modern vampire community. The term “re-enchantment” appears with increasing frequency, but it is usually invoked rather than defined. Partridge convincingly argues that secularization has actually created the conditions for new and meaningful forms o…
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…im organizations fall into lock-step with it, stems solely from a single 20-year-old document written by a single Brotherhood member in 1991. In the controversial terrorism financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which first resulted in a mistrial in 2007, and convictions in a 2008 re-trial, federal prosecutors introduced a document, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” Gaffney and others h…
Read More…off from the main Shiite branch of Islam.” The fact that there is a larger number of non-Isma’ili Shi’ah does not make them the main branch. If the central belief of Shi’ism is the belief of Imamah, then the only group with a present, living Imam are 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…
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