Religion Dispatches
Religious historian Jennifer Graber discusses her examination of Protestant prison reformers, in which she upsets common assumptions about evangelicals, and our images of kind-hearted Quakers and bloodthirsty Calvinists.
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In 1986, Judith C. Brown published a book about Renaissance Italy called Immodest Acts. It was reviewed in the New York Times, The Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle, not to mention many scholarly venues. Why? Perhaps because the subtitle of the book was The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.
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In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.
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The book is at once a rich, humorous history of comics, a political commentary on the absurdities of conservative British and American culture, and a deeply personal memoir. The relevant moments for us here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies…
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In the concluding volume of his trilogy on religion and secularism, the author argues that there is no chasm between religious belief and non-belief; certainly not in terms of politics and not even in personal terms.
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RD talks with journalist Amy Waldman whose first novel, The Submission, presciently imagines a controversy, set in post-9/11 New York City, in which the design of a Muslim-American wins a contest to build a 9/11 memorial.
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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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