Religion Dispatches
In My Jesus Year a young “metrodox” Jew spends a year church-hopping in order to get perspective on his own faith. Sounds daring, but turns out to be a fairly relaxed exercise. Our reviewer proposes a much tougher challenge…
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In this lyrical excerpt, author Kim Chernin envisions a new solution that rises up from the Sinai desert nurtured by two little girls.
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Carlene Bauer lost her faith, but it wasn’t because she was raised on the far-right fringe of fundamentalist religion—it was more that she thought God deserved better than the clichés of modern evangelicalism.
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While the rioting over the Danish cartoons seems to be well behind us, Yale University Press recently removed the images from a new scholarly work on the topic. Do Muslim extremists need a scholarly book as pretext with two wars being fought in Muslim nations and an ongoing crisis in Gaza? The problem isn’t with these images, but with the ubiquitous Islamophobia in the United States.
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Rembert Weakland is a Catholic progressive, a Benedictine monk, and a former Archbishop. His new memoir tells the story of a career marked by good work, pastoral advocacy, and the public scandal of a gay love life.
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Feminists hate religion, right? Not necessarily. From Christian feminists participating in Wiccan rituals to Goddess worshipers honoring Jesus, the landscape of feminist spirituality is is not what it was in the ’60s and ’70s.
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By presenting itself as a disinterested collection of “facts” and “data,” an alarmist new book about the Muslim threat to Europe has been taken more seriously than your standard Islamophobic pamphlet.
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Reflections on the Revolution in Europe tells of a tide of Muslim immigration ravaging European culture, and threatening the future of Western civilization. Its author, Christopher Caldwell, makes Samuel “clash of civilizations” Huntington look like a benign minor prophet.
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Christopher Caldwell’s new book on Islam and the West is fraught with inconsistency, selective history, and outright error. But, for all that, it is a must-read.
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A new book by veteran organizer Marshall Ganz tells the sometimes triumphant, sometimes cautionary tale of the rise and fall of Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. While the story of the movement’s successes is well known, the reasons for its decline are more mysterious—until now.
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