Religion Dispatches
…Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I didn’t get one, but my citizen journalist dues are current. Stay tuned….
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…orm. The problem here is that this worldview does not account for the many places where the various subgroups of this ‘party of the oppressed’ are actually in tension. An Orthodox Jewish man (marginalized by his religion) asking a woman (marginalized by her gender) to move on an airplane is a pretty good illustration of this. Another place this tension plays out is in mainline Protestant denominations with regards to same sex marriage and the ordi…
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…ery human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper place. Legal conservatism was originally imagined as a libertarian bastion of the limited state and free markets. Since the early 1990s, however, as anti-abortion protests and violence helped spur an alliance between traditionalist Catholics and evangelical Protestants, which in turn catalyzed the Republican Party, legal conservatism has increasingly inhabited the landscape…
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Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
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…ation is no exception. Collective salvation is illustrated in, among other places, Matthew 5:23-24: “when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” In other words, to be reconciled to God, we must also be reconciled to one another. Salvation may be pe…
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…We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless in…
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…e success either. The opening weekend saw sales of more than $6 million in tickets. That’s the kind of number that will inspire others to try and figure out the formula for the faith-and-family blockbuster. Yet, with the cost of the film reportedly exceeding $30 million, it’s an open question whether or not the Left Behind reboot will get a second installment. The marketing problem of evangelical movies is still, stubbornly, a problem. The general…
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…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…
Read MoreAt oral argument in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties, Inc. v. Sebelius this morning, the Supreme Court justices spent a great deal of time questioning the lawyers in the case about whether corporations have a religious conscience, and whether Congress intended to protect it when enacting the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia So…
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…better. The problem, he seemed to be saying, is with blaming in the first place. Blaming an airline is disorienting because it applies a human-oriented inference system to an entity that simply doesn’t act like a person. So if we find ourselves blaming institutions, I asked him, are we already using a set of flawed psychological mechanisms? “It’s not that we’re using flawed psychological mechanisms,” he responded. “We’re using the only psychologi…
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