Category: Timely

The Extraordinary, Amazing, Miraculous Story of Christian Hollywood

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Amy Levin: It’s only the end of January and many of us are already in winter break withdrawal – missing those precious days when you can sit back, relax with your nieces and nephews and watch those fun, PG-rated, faithy, family films about saving cute animals and. . . yourself? Yes, the days when Disney got away with feeding kids spoonfuls of gendered and racially flavored sugar are perhaps behind us (no they’re not), but we’re certainly far from beyond consuming tales infused with religious ingredients, that is, Dolphin Tale (watch the trailer here, if it doesn’t make you tear up, I don’t know what will).

Dolphin Tale is the “amazing true story” of the friendship between a boy and a bottlenose dolphin named Winter, who he helps rescue when Winter is caught in a crab trap off the cost of Florida. Continue Reading →

Back In the Habit and Looking Good

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Ashley Baxstrom: The Devil may wear Prada, but that doesn’t mean he owns the market on being fashionably faithy.

Check out the hot new line debuting over at the Community of Compassion, a new Anglican Catholic order in Forth Worth, Texas. When Mother Mary Magdalene, founder of the order, needed help designing new habits – because foundresses are required to design unique new habits for their new orders – she turned to artist Julia Sherman for help, and the result was something new and, in a slightly discomfiting way, a little sexy. Continue Reading →

Women, Orthodoxy and the Public Square

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Amy Levin: Rick Perry says it’s America’s war on religion, but a subset of the ultra-orthodox in Israel might beg to differ. Perry’s concerns have more to do with school prayer and re-sanctifying Christmas, but many of Israel’s ultra-orthodox are concerned with feminism, or what most feminists would simply call gender equality. Clashes between so-called religious and secular Israelis are nothing new, but a recent spur of incidents has caused a stir in the past few months.  For instance in December an 8-year old Israeli modern orthodox girl, Naama Margolese, was spit on and called a prostitute on her way to school by ultra-orthodox men –apparently her fully covered arms and legs were still considered immodest. Continue Reading →

Jews Writing Jews, January 24

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January, 24, 2012 | 6:00 – 7:30pm, 20 Cooper Square

Henry Goldschmidt (Race and Religion Among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights), Theodore Ross (Am I a Jew? forthcoming; editor, Men’s Journal), and Matthew Shaer (Among Righteous Men; contributor, New York Magazine)

Moderated by Alana Newhouse (editor, Tablet Magazine)

Three writers discuss the challenges of reporting and writing about Jewish communities other than their own. Continue Reading →

The End of Our Affair with Gossip Girl?

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Jo Piazza: After five seasons of defying everything good and holy, capitalizing on debaucherous underage sex and drug abuse, using a ménage a trois in a national ad campaign and generally creating some of the more deviant characters on primetime television, Gossip Girl has found god—the Catholic version no less.

And they have done it by appropriating the handy narrative created by Graham Greene in the last of his four overtly Catholic novels The End of the Affair.

Continue Reading →

Outside the Law: Cheryl Perich and the First Amendment

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There’s nothing quite like a First Amendment dispute to illuminate the subtleties of interpreting separation of church and state.

By Elissa Lerner

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time to uphold a forty year-old practice known as the “ministerial exception” in the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School vs. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In Hosanna-Tabor, Cheryl Perich, a teacher who mostly taught secular subjects but also religion and occasionally led prayers, was fired after taking a leave of absence to receive treatment for narcolepsy. She threatened to sue the school for violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). A federal appeals court concluded that since her primary duties were secular in nature, she was therefore not a minister and could sue under ADA. However, the Supreme Court, in its first ministerial exception case, unanimously decided to overturn the decision, ruling that the question of who is a minister could not be “resolved by a stopwatch.” For the government to interfere with a church’s firing process “intrudes upon more than a mere employment decision,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts. “Such action interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.” Continue Reading →

It’s in the Mail!

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Dear Readers, If you want to receive a print copy of the Spring 2012 Events Calendar for The Center for Religion and Media at New York University (our publisher!) just ask!  Post a comment to this post, include your name and complete address, and wait for the mail man.  Happy spring!  Ann

P.S. You can also keep your eye on our site:  www.crmnyu.org Continue Reading →

Ralph Reed on Iowa

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From the CNN article, “My Take: Iowa Caucus Results Puncture Myth of ‘Evangelical Vote'” by Ralph Reed, founder and chairmen of the Faith and Freedom Coalition:

Here’s how the evangelical vote broke down: 32% for Santorum, 18% for Ron Paul, 13% each for Romney, Gingrich and Rick Perry, 6% for Michele Bachmann and 1% for Jon Huntsman.

This suggests a more nuanced and complex portrait of voters of faith. They are often crudely portrayed as voting based solely on identity politics, born suckers for quotes from Scripture or “code words” laced in the speeches of candidates appealing to their spiritual beliefs.

Evangelical voters, it turns out, are a more sophisticated bunch, judging candidates on a broad continuum of considerations from their personal faith and character to leadership attributes and electability.

Continue Reading →

Liberalism Killing the Copts

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Reuters reports that Egypt’s Coptic Christians are receiving an unprecedented amount of foreign support; subsequently they fear “a backlash from Muslims who could resent special attention to a minority at a time when all Egyptians are suffering economic hardship and political uncertainty.”  Which reminds us of a provocative article by Marc Michael that Al Jazeera posted in November.  Of the march by Coptic Christians on October 9th that led to 20 deaths– a march protesting not the Egyptian government but the burning of a building that was slated to become a church–Michael writes:

…this march inscribed itself in a liberal project of identity politics – a politics based around the notion that irreducible differences occur naturally in society, that the interest-groups coalescing around them have specific needs and rights, which the state ought to protect against the tyrannical rule of the selfish majority. To many Third-World ‘minorities’, this type of contemporary Anglo-Saxon liberal thought represents a certain temptation, a flirtation with a distant, spectacular and utopian modernity that happens in Europe or in the United States. Copts are in no way immune to that dangerous attraction, particularly so considering the very high proportion of the Coptic diaspora living in Canada, the US or Europe. It is in that sense that liberalism is killing the Copts: in cheering them to embrace their estrangement from Egyptian society, to value their alienation as an end in itself, and to seek the legal support of the state in establishing their difference as a social fact.

Continue Reading →