Marginal Christianity

 SEPTEMBER 21, 2017 BY  FREDERICK SCHMIDT    1 COMMENT Much of the literature on the fundamentalist – modernist controversy of the 1920’s and 30’s is described as the struggle of fundamentalists against modernity — its science, its ways of thinking, approaches to Scripture, and, in particular, the theory of evolution. But what we don’t talk about very much is the way in which the desire not be thought of as fundamentalist has shaped mainline Protestantism. If you read the history of that period, you will discover that big donors to Riverside Church in New York City — where Harry Emerson Fosdick was the preacher for so many years — gave to the building of Riverside, precisely as an effort to stem the spread of fundamentalism. If you read the steady stream of blogging, there is no end to the skewering . . . Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/whatgodwantsforyourlife/2017/09/god-given-weirdness/#7QLZUoMkHFkdScDm.99

Posted September 22nd, 2016 by Alex Wilgus & filed under Religion . American Christians, especially Evangelicals have long been taken to task for rejecting the life of the mind. Mark Noll’s 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and most recently Alan Jacobs’s much discussed piece for Harper’s “The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?” tell a story of withdrawal from academia and intellectual pursuits. The long and short of it seems to be that yesterday’s fundamentalists and today’s evangelicals make up the religious wing of Richard Hofstadter’s famous assertion of American “anti-intellectualism” and the national preference for sloganeering over sophistication. The evangelicals, like their fundamentalist forbears, shrunk from the intellectual calling because of some animus toward smartypants types. But there is a different way to tell the story. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, the world was in a scientific mood. New industry and...

April 13, 2015 by Dan Wilkinson 5 Comments Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse’s new book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, $29.99), engagingly traces the rise of the Christian Right as a political force in America. Kruse explores how business interests of the 1930s fought back against the New Deal and, in an attempt to counteract government regulation and oversight, enlisted the aid of religion. This Christian libertarianism “linked capitalism and Christianity and, at the same time, likened the welfare state to godless paganism.” That movement eventually mutated into something far more powerful. Kruse summarizes this development: In their struggle against the New Deal, the business lobbies of the Depression era had allied themselves with conservative religious and cultural leaders and, in so doing, set in motion a new dynamic in American politics. The activism of Christian libertarians such as James Fif...

                      How fragile the belief of an Islamist must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a weekly satirical newspaper, says the Slovenian philosopher. by Slavoj Zizek Published 10 January, 2015 - 21:31   French police at the Jewish supermarket in Paris where several people were taken hostage. Now, when we are all in a state of shock after the killing spree in the Charlie Hebdo offices, it is the right moment to gather the courage to think . We should, of course, unambiguously condemn the killings as an attack on the very substance our freedoms, and condemn them without any hidden caveats (in the style of " Charlie Hebdo was nonetheless provoking and humiliating the Muslims too much"). But such pathos of universal solidarity is not enough – we should think further. Such thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with the...