Religion Dispatches
…e politics that has shaped many of us makes what we say very irrelevant to today’s issues. I think a good part of the church is in denial as to how this country has really changed. I never heard of this Dearborn Awakening event that happened until I read your piece today, but I want to offer an apology for this speaker that lied and confused people. I offer this as a Christian and student of the Word that is called by God to obey and not simply kn…
Read MoreToday, Mitt Romney released a new video attacking Rick Perry as being “soft” on immigration. Romney is aiming at Perry’s support for a Texas state policy that permits the young people who came to the United States “illegally” as children to attend public universities paying in-state tuition. It’s not radical policy, but Romney’s criticism is yet another point—like Social Security—he’s using to draw a strong contrast with Perry. But doing so puts…
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…ut American religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty…
Read More…cess among evangelical voters. While the evangelical magazine Christianity Today recently pointed out that the majority of evangelicals aren’t supporting Trump, that doesn’t change the fact that in the Southern Bible states where Trump has won he has done so in part by capturing the largest share of evangelical voters in the state. Trump nearly doubled Cruz’s share of evangelicals in the Alabama primary, winning 43 percent to Cruz’s 22 percent. (T…
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…lived partially as Jews, and had some status in the Jewish community. But today’s non-Jewish Jews aren’t identifying as such because they live in Jewish enclaves, but because identifying as “Jewish” has become an asset and fashionable; it’s no longer a liability. The impact this community will have on the Jewish community remains to be seen. *Read more from “Pew and the Jews: ‘So What?’”, an RD special feature on the Pew survey. Like this story?…
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…ng the two together, I’m always forced to choose. Will I be Asian American today or gay today? In the LGBT community, even where I feel really safe, I rarely hear anything that affirms my cultural background or the racism of notions of beauty in the community. Singularity is the sin that resonates with me—forcing people to choose one thing over another in terms of our identities. Hybridity, like an apple-pear blend, gets to the notion that we can…
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…professor, Moustafa Bayoumi’s “The God that Failed: The Neo-Orientalism of Today’s Muslim Commentators” situates Hirsi Ali within a cohort that more nearly matches our own experience and outlook than the arch proponent of Muslim difference, Tariq Ramadan. Bayoumi compares her to two figures like her: Irshad Manji and Reza Aslan. All are immigrant Muslims to the United States. All attempt to explain Islam to others from their own experience of its…
Read More…. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!” In a statement today, Political Research Associates condemned the murder and demanded an end to “the export of homophobia to Uganda by American conservatives.” “Kato’s murder is a heavy blow to the international human rights community,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, the director of PRA’s Project on Religion and Sexuality. “Those U.S conservatives who have lit the brushfire of homophobia in Afric…
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Senator Grassley used a term today at the hearings of Sonia Sotomayor: “The Empathy Standard.” Citing President Obama’s stated criterion that he would nominate someone for the Supreme Court who had a capacity for empathy, Grassley worried that Sonia Sotomayor might be too empathic. And this propensity made him and a number of other Republican senators anxious [See “Obama’s Pick Sotomayor Derided by Conservatives for Empathy,” by Paul Gorrell]. In…
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…ized around categories and silos that don’t reflect how people really live today or the work we have to do understand the world we live in. To change this, you have to be in conversation with the right kind of people. You have to make a commitment to talk interdisciplinarily. You can’t be with people who will retreat to the fallback position of their discipline. You have to invite people to the table who are willing to ask questions from new persp…
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