Religion Dispatches
A new book shows how a cohort of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews altered the nation; from the Social Gospel movement through anti-Communism, Civil Rights and even into the rise of the religious right.
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He wrote to his mother, saying, more or less, Jesus was only a man and a man is on his own. It’s clear that there was a lot of anguish in that decision. If anything, untethering his conscience from religion put more pressure on him to prove himself and his sincerity. When Evan was manacled to the bars of his cell in Fort Leavenworth because of his absolute refusal to serve the army, his friend (and President Wilson’s son-in-law’s brother) John Nevin Sayre went to Wilson on his behalf and repeatedly described Evan to Wilson as Christ-like. Evan would have hated that description, but clearly part of him wanted that and needed that kind of commitment.
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is a novel that steers clear of both strident attacks against religion and sanctimonious pieties. Instead, it explores the reality of religious fervor and examines the merit of both religious and anti-religious stances. And yet… because it is so respectful, patient, and level-headed, Goldstein’s novel may be actually more subversive than other, more straightforward anti-theistic tracts.
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Among the first generation of women rabbis and among the first generation of lesbian rabbis is Rebecca Alpert. Shaped by her own teachers, including Mordecai Kaplan, who founded Reconstructionist Judaism, Alpert is currently a faculty member in religious studies at Temple University. She is also the author of books on Reconstructionist and progressive Judaism, on the place of lesbians within Judaism, and, most recently, on Jews in black baseball.
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Walking down the street in my neighborhood a few years ago I was warmly greeted by the president of my synagogue, who cheerily introduced me to her new male companion. “You’ll like Rebecca,” she said. “She’s the one who gives those baseball sermons on Yom Kippur…”
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Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed Are the Organized is arguably even more relevant now than when it was published last year. Even then, the United States economy had collapsed in on itself. Barack Obama’s role had fully shifted from community organizer to Beltway compromiser, and the grassroots was being overgrown by Tea Party “astroturf.” But now—as politicians wrestle our economy even lower to the ground at the behest of organized elites, and the voice of the majority seems to grow ever fainter in their ears—the kind of real grassroots organizing Stout writes about seems all the more to be what we need.
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Frequently assumptions are made about what happened after the Council without actually doing the social history necessary to make accurate descriptions of what occurred in parishes. Conservatives cite the mythical nuns-wearing-miniskirts but they neglect to interview Catholics of the “Greatest Generation” who actually lived through the transitions. Something called “the Sixties” gets blamed for all the problems in Catholicism, but the nitty-gritty scholarship has not been done to legitimate pointing fingers.
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A conversation with Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden.
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While many books will no doubt be written about the momentous events that are unfolding in the Middle East, many of them will doubtless leave out the prehistory. By exploring the rich tradition of nonviolent resistance in the Muslim world—from Palestine and Pakistan, to Kosovo and the Maldives—Amitabh Pal dispels the oft-repeated misconception that what we are witnessing in the Arab Spring is without precedent.
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