Religion Dispatches
…changing, in the post-Bush era. The widespread and renewed involvement of left-leaning college students in the last presidential campaign was notable for its thoughtfulness. Youth activists on the right and the left in the recent election cycle were far less concerned with the predictable array of culture-conservative issues that have a distinctly religious valence (abortion, same-sex sexuality, marriage mandates) than they were with the new Berm…
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…ng overcome with a sense of fear that he was the anti-Christ. Eventually I left fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, and then just started researching apocalypticism. If you look across history, millenarian end-times thinking is ubiquitous. Judaism has some millenarian elements. Christianity probably began as an apocalyptic movement. Islam—a lot of people have talked about that having been started as an end-times, eschatologically motivated re…
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…ive and well), but rather of a truly progressive (if not actually radical) Left. The cynic in me fears that the truest words spoken in this campaign were Senator McCain’s early on—before he nominated Governor Palin, before even the illusion, and thus the allure, of his “maverick” status was lost. He once wagged a cautionary finger at his own party, reminded them that “we came to change Washington, and instead Washington changed us.” The cynic in m…
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…e mystery of our embodied existence. As a theologian, what do you think is left out of the mix if God, or the divine, isn’t entangled with other forms of knowledge? I think if God-talk simply drops out of sophisticated discourse and is just replaced by a wide range of philosophical, spiritual, poetical metaphors that avoid the Abrahamisms of the past, what’s left behind is simply our consciousness of who we are. That is, if we shift into atheism i…
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…port for bellicosity quickly withers. Take the piece from March 31 [image, left]. There’s an M1 Abrams tank rolling before a desert sunset, with words from chapter 6 of the Epistle to the Ephesians, enjoining hearers to “put on the full armor of God” and “stand your ground.” (Typos aside, most passages are from the New International Version of the Bible, a popular evangelical translation.) But in the verse just before that, it’s perfectly clear th…
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…ry. “That is not the arm of Zachary Dennis, or if it is, it was not a mark left by John Freshwater,” Daubenmire said. When asked to clarify, Daubenmire at first denied he was accusing the Dennis family of lying. Then he accused them of being in it for money. In August, the family reached a settlement with the school district. The board’s insurance company paid $115,500 toward the plaintiffs’ legal fees and $5,502 to the plaintiffs. The $5,500 was…
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…of the American dream. By the time I met them, some of these women had left religious life, having shed their habits in the late 1960s, as my mother had, as if to feel more of the breeze blowing after Vatican II famously “opened the windows of the Church.” Others left not long after, to marry or to work jobs of their choosing, while a few have kept their vows to this day. I could usually tell the nuns from the ex-nuns by their shoes: blue canv…
Read More…f supporting gay rights. In 2009, when Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a left-wing politician famous for his social liberalism, signed into law Mexico City’s same-sex marriage ordinance, he tuned a deaf ear to the Catholic Church’s threat of excommunication. That would have been unthinkable only a few years prior. Former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, today hailed as a gay rights heroine for her fierce advocacy of marriage e…
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…s. Some scholars believe the Dionysian mystery cult and early Christianity left a legible impress on each other’s traditions, and that the two religions fought for cultural dominance. Both Jesus and Dionysus embody the archetype of the god who dies and is reborn; both were begotten miraculously (Dionysus from his father Zeus’s thigh); both were honored with wine rituals consecrated to their resurrection; and both were ritually consumed by their wo…
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…ion of civil rights on the basis of “the content of our character.” On the left, King was being stripped of his mythic shine as a repackaged radical opponent of neo-liberalism. It was a pitched battle for the right to control the mythos and image of King within political discourse. As previously discussed on RD, American civic holidays, like the nation itself, are in a time of crisis. New holidays such as Juneteenth have been added to the federal…
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