christianity

(A)theologies

The Other, Forgotten Apocalypse of 2011

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I think I can safely assume that for most Americans, Camping and his miscalculated (and then re-calculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world…

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(A)theologies, Books

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

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“What the feminist movement and the LGBT movement have become for religious communities is a test of hospitality. Are you really open to accepting and welcoming everyone? Is the personhood of the gay couple as welcome as the personhood of the straight couple? It’s not just simply what your political position is about the rights of these people, but are these people really people? And are they people with their full wisdom, their full experience, their full sense of who they are? Are they really, truly welcomed into the deepest realms of making community?”

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Books, RD10Q

The Lethal Mix of Religion and War, Or, Why the World Ended in 1099

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The biggest misconception about the crusades is the belief that everyone understood them as religious wars between Christianity and Islam. Latin Christians understood it in that fashion, but for Greek Christians, the crusaders were essentially mercenaries employed against a rival empire. Both the Sunni Turks and the Shi‘i Egyptians probably understood the crusades in similar terms. It would take the Muslims several decades to learn to think of the battles against the Franks as religious wars rather than as conflicts over the control of frontier settlements.

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(A)theologies, Books

Dumping Satan: It’s Time to Let Go

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The history of Christianity, as atheists are fond of reminding us, is one that has been drenched in blood. Whether religious war, inquisition, or colonial violence, there’s been great evil committed in the name of God. What role has the idea of Satan played in the development of this culture?

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Books, Politics/Law

Untethering Conscience From Religion: An Interview with Louisa Thomas

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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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(A)theologies, Books

Marxism, the Opium of the Professoriate?

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Usually, a book about ideas is pretty straightforward. The author is saying this stuff because he believes it. With Terry Eagleton, the British Marxist literary theorist, it’s less so. Marxism, in Eagleton’s hands, is neither exactly a science, nor a practical political agenda. It emerges as essentially a vision, a gaze, a discourse—of political life transformed, of human dignity at last universalized.

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