If you missed the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) this past weekend, you are most likely not aware that Prof. Wendy Doniger received an award. Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago Divinity School, “has authored and co-authored numerous influential books on mythology and translations of Hindu texts, including Siva: The Erotic Ascetic; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India; The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade; and The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth.
When we last heard from Wendy Doniger she was playing the role of religious public intellectual with this wonderful contribution to civil discourse. Commenting on the Vice Presidential nomination of Sarah Palin, Doniger declared that “[Palin’s] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.” Not content to declare her insufficiently female, Doniger then offered up this brilliant analysis:
And as for religion, I’d love to know precisely how the Good Lord conveyed to her so clearly his intention to destroy the environment (global warming, she thinks, is not the work of human hands, so it must be the work of You Know Who), the lives of untold thousands of soldiers and innocent bystanders (He is apparently rooting for this, too, she says), and, incidentally, a lot of polar bears and wolves, not to mention all the people who will be shot with the guns that she thinks other people ought to have. An even wider and more sinister will to impose her religious views on other people surfaced in her determination to legislate against abortion even in cases of rape and in her attempts to ban books, including books on evolution, and to fire the librarian who stood against her.
And what was the award, you were wondering? Prof. Doniger is “the recipient of the 2008 Martin Marty Award for contributions to the public understanding of religion.”
Meanwhile, not to be outdone by the folks at the AAR, the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) have granted Barack Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright the honor of delivering a plenary address at the SCE’S annual meeting in January. The title of Reverend Wright’s plenary address: Where’s the Outrage?
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