I think of this as a Yeatsian framework because it privileges the supposedly "more authentic" forms of religion due to their passionate intensity, while disregarding the supposedly "less authentic" due to their imagined lack of all conviction. And because it admires the passionate intensity of what I consider the worst aspects of religion while dismissing what I consider the best of religion as nothing more than that lack of conviction. Read more
The compulsion to elevate oneself as the righteous remnant, and to draw boundaries between Real True Believers and everyone else, is the hallmark of a particular strain of fundamentalist religion. It is a mark of religion that, I think, has elevated the cardinal sin above the cardinal virtue -- substituting pride for love. That pride drives the obsessive need to constantly make and enforce distinctions between Us, the righteous few, and Them, the apostate hordes falsely claiming the name of our religion as they trundle down the broad path toward destruction. Read more
This is what LaHaye and Jenkins believe it means to be a Christian. This is what LaHaye and Jenkins believe it means to be a human. Hannah Arendt gave a name to this perspective: "the banality of evil." The subject of her book, like the heroes of Left Behind, was a man primarily focused on travel arrangements. Read more
Vincent Price is theologically significant. Price wore a devilish goatee that made him look like Satan. How do we know that’s what Satan looks like? We learned it from Vincent Price — and from a thousand other pop-culture and folk-culture figures preceding him. Read more
Here's the premise for a TV show: It's all true. Everything Pat Robertson says is true. Everything that's posted on Charismanews is true. All of it. All the writers need to do is conform the fictional reality of the show to the wild reality described every day by Robertson, et. al. Read more
"Pray" isn't the only verb that works this way. "I thank you" is another example. The deed itself consists of reciting the same words we use to describe it. The giving of thanks involves the saying of "thanks." I say, "I thank you," and thereby I thank you. Read more
The remarkable thing here is that Anderson's skeptical take on multilevel marketing appeared on the website of Christianity Today -- a publication at the institutional heart of the white evangelical subculture. And in that subculture, you can't swing a Stella & Dot necklace with hitting several institutions dependent on multilevel marketing money. Read more
Jerry Jenkins is, for the most part, terrible at world-building and continuity. His fictional world contradicts itself repeatedly. He introduces huge changes and then forgets about them just a few pages later. But on this one point he is reliably, relentlessly consistent. The misogyny in this chapter -- the contempt and disgust for women displayed here -- permeates the entirety of this story and of the theology that drives it. Read more
Here we have a choice that -- according to the pope himself -- can be made for either good or bad reasons. As a spiritual leader, then, the pope has a choice to make about this choice. One possibility would be for him to teach and encourage his followers to make good choices for good reasons. Another possibility would be for him to preclude the possibility of his followers making bad choices by arrogating to himself the right to make this choice on behalf of everyone else. And he chose the second one. That is immoral and unjust. Read more
New York state is still shackling pregnant inmates. What's to stop Vladimir Putin from going all Koch/Adelson? A Southern Baptist college takes swift action to purge itself of professors who are critical of racism. Plus Samuel Beckett, John Muir and a bad day for the weinermobile. Read more
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