A Slight Delay

Robert McElvaine is one pissed-off individual. It’s hard to escape the conclusion, all the way from the cover to the very last page of his Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America. On the other hand, all the old saws about not judging a book by its cover aside, once you get to the contents, it’s easy to see why he might be–ahem–slightly perturbed.

The author’s interest is in those who’ve read the New Testament so closely that they can’t see the forest–in this case, Jesus’ teachings and central message–for the trees (i.e. the individual, highly legalized, very specific and often very specious focus on certain bits that make the more difficult bits of Jesus go down easy). To say that he’s disturbed by the shape of the religious landscape in this country would be putting it mildly. Writing of those he calls “Lite Christians,” he says:

They’re all about having fun, spending money, and seeking pleasure, but when it comes to the fundamental teachings of Jesus, they take a pass. Turn the other cheek? Self-sacrifice? Help the poor? Nonviolence? That shit’s too hard!

And, as it turns out, McElvaine’s in a target-rich environment. (more…)

So when, exactly, is tolerance a bad, or at the very least counterproductive, thing? Former New York Times religion writer (and current Syracuse professor) Gustav Niebuhr sets out to answer that question in Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America , a far-ranging overview of the work that’s gone on in our recent past toward fostering religious understanding and cooperation.

At some point early in our education, we’re told that the United States was founded in no small part by religious dissidents, and on the basis of religious freedom. What this manages to overlook–though Niebuhr, thankfully, does not–is that this freedom was most likely to be extended to one’s own, but not as much to those who believed and worshipped in a way that was different from the rest of the community. As with other freedoms we cherish (see last week’s reviews of Commager and Lewis on the First Amendment), our religious freedom has long been a work in progress.

Somewhere amid all this research and development, among all the intramural squabbles among the various Christianities that flourished in the new soil of the New World, and between the fits and starts of schisms within schisms, a Christian consensus of sorts started to emerge. That consensus didn’t often–well, to be honest, didn’t usually–take in other religions. Beyond Tolerance is driven by the efforts, from America’s earliest days, to rectify that error. (more…)

As with so much else, Rumi had it right:

When light returns to its source
it takes nothing
of what it has illuminated.

It may have shone on a garbage dump, or a garden,
or in the center of a human eye. No matter.

It goes, and when it does,
the open plain becomes passionately desolate
wanting it back.

Remember that old song, “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places”? Okay, usually I picture Eddie Murphy as Buckwheat singing it–but I digress. What about the places in which we look for God?

We think of God, generally, as some vast, exalted being. So we’re used to looking for God in vast, or at least seemingly exalted places. Westminster Abbey, the Taj Mahal (the original, not Trump’s abomination), St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Angkor Wat, the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock would probably make most people’s short list; the Hudson River, juke joints, the Chicken Shack, or the local pound, probably not so much. And more’s the pity. (more…)

I’m not sure what it is about me that everyone thinks I need to be converted to something else. Catholics, Muslims, Jehova’s Witnesses, and Protestants of practically every stripe think that I need to join their crowd. It’s like PBS with loaves and fishes; a perfectly innocent everyday conversation is chugging along nicely, only to be brought to a screeching halt by some kind of churchy pledge drive.

This has happened so often that I’ve come up with some coping strategies in case anyone decides that there’s something religiously or theologically wrong with you. Use as many of the following as are necessary ‘til your interlocutor has had enough/sobs with frustration. (more…)

One thing life should teach everyone, sooner rather than later, is never to say, “Now I’ve seen everything.” I was reminded of this when I made the mistake of answering a question posed to me during an everyday conversation. I was asked if I’d ever read Rhonda Byrne’s insipid and insidious The Secret (the insipid and insidious part wasn’t part of my interrogator’s question, merely my own editorializing).

I answered that I hadn’t, but that I’d once been subjected to the movie, because someone at my last place of employment apparently thought it was so deep and insightful, we should all be subjected to it. Normally, I would never take the movie over the book; this is one time I gladly made an exception. Hell, it’s bad enough I’ll never get those 90 minutes of my life back.

You would think that I’d just told Billy Graham that I thought the Bible was crap. (more…)

Blogs on religion proliferate like weeds on the web. Unfortunately, they all too often settle into trite cliches, facile dogmatism, and sloppy theology. A refreshing exception comes to us courtesy of Amicus Dei, a blog written by Pastor Chuck Warnock. Once you’ve read his writing, both there and on his other blogs, such as Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor, you come to realize that any preconceptions you might’ve had about Baptist pastors pretty much go out the window. At least mine did. (more…)

Douglas Adams famously referred to himself as a “militant Atheist,” mostly so that people would know he did not, in fact, believe God existed; he didn’t want to be confused with a garden-variety agnostic. However, the last few years have given rise–or at least a lot more attention–to an atheism that is militant in the more traditional understanding. These atheists have raised their profile considerably, collectively publishing thousands of pages on their belief system, and spending a good amount of time on the bestseller lists as a result. To wit: Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great; Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion; Sam Harris’s The End of Belief and Letter To A Christian Nation; and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

More on them later; for now, let’s have a look at one of the products of a pendulum shift in the other direction, courtesy of Chris Hedges. Previously the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists, Hedges trained early on as a seminarian, and later cut his teeth as a journalist for the New York Times. With I Don’t Believe in Atheists, Hedges concerns himself with—to borrow a phrase from Tariq Ali—the clash of fundamentalisms. In doing this, he’s delivered not only a good read, but also something that will hopefully start a lively (not to mention probably heated) debate. (more…)