This Supreme Court is an Effect Not a Cause: The Hidden Century-Long Funding of the American Right
In a bombshell story last month, the New York Times revealed that two years ago…
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Book Bannings Are Bad Enough, But Where Those Involved Are Considered Demonic, the Stakes Could Get Much Higher
Calls for, or at least predictions of, revolution or civil war have been common on…
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The Vile Attack on Salman Rushdie Reminds Us of the Value of a Free Society — But is Our Outrage More About the Criminal Than the Crime?
When it was published in 1988, The Satanic Verses wasn’t immediately controversial. But the charged…
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Sometimes Dialogue is Not the Answer and Neutrality is a Trap: An Interview with the Authors of ‘The Neutrality Trap’
Regular readers of Religion Dispatches will likely be familiar with my fairly frequent forays into…
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Breaking Up With Marilynne Robinson Over Her Refusal to Acknowledge the Dark Side of Puritanism
Breaking up is hard to do, and I am not at all prepared to discard…
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Stalked by The Plague, ‘The Maiden of All Our Desires’ Follows a Medieval Abbey at a Time When Monastic Life Was a Refuge for Women
A woman disappears, “taken by wind.” A one-eyed priest frantically carves a feminine-looking crucifix for…
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What Role do Feelings Play in Conspiracy, Racism and Climate Denial? Welcome to Phoning It In, Episode 1
Welcome to “Phoning It In,” a gameshow I made up because I am tired and…
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Reexamining the Shaky Theology That Gives Humans ‘Dominion’ Over All Creation
Dominion theology—the idea that humans are created uniquely like God and given godlike rule over…
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‘How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World’: An Interview with Author Elle Hardy
Australian-born journalist Elle Hardy’s exposé of global Pentecostalism, released in November by an independent UK…
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With Demons Held Responsible These Days for Everything from Covid to LGBTQ Rights, Take a Visual Tour of the History of Demonization
During our season of political madness, it took a lot to trigger a double-take, and…
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