Religion Dispatches
…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…
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…hting of the temple began and everyone became transfixed by the fire. Each year I find the temple and its fiery demise the most moving experience on the playa; even if someone is hollering obnoxiously or playing with a laser pointer. If every other playa site invites irreverence and irony, this is still the one that takes meaning most seriously. It is a site of both voyeurism and participation, where our deepest fears and most painful losses are a…
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…count the great unchurched free radicals of the 19th and 20th centuries as official Protestants, there is no doubt at all that, unofficially, that is just what many were: not just the towering Lincoln but also such figures as Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry George, the James brothers (no, not those James boys: I mean Henry and William), Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce,…
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…ualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marriages in many countries. I am glad to see that in Section 34 he understands this basic fact of contemporary western culture: The ideal of marriage, marked by a commitment to exclusivity and stability, is swept aside whenever it proves inconvenient or tiresome. The fear of loneliness and the desire for stability and fidelity exist side by side with a growing fe…
Read MoreFirst, Glenn Beck goes off the conservative reservation by declaring that same-sex marriage is no threat to America by saying: “I believe that Thomas Jefferson said, ‘If it neither breaks my leg or picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?’” Then, the notoriously homophobic Ann Coulter gets booked to headline next month’s “Homocon,” an event put on by GOProud, a group of gay Republicans. Coulter’s willingness to talk to gay Republicans got Wo…
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…and affirms the stained-glass ceiling on the pastoral role of women: “the reservation of the priesthood to males … is not a question open to discussion” (#103). Francis further worried that a discussion on women’s ordination “can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general”—as if the “reservation of the priesthood to males” had nothing whatsoever to do “with power in general” (#104). Evangelii Ga…
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…lectorate than it is with straight voters. LePen’s Party, which includes a number of openly gay officials, still pledges to roll back the marriage equality law in favor of civil unions. As AP notes, LePen is not the only nationalist leader who uses fear of radical Islamist violence to attract LGBT support: In the Netherlands, Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders said that his party, which is hostile to Muslims and wants to halt immigration, shou…
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…ne, no credentialed specialists in religious studies were appointed to the official review panels. Furthermore, the official review process is tightly restricted in both time and scope. Official reviewers have only one week to review all textbooks—an absurdly short time. My review of world geography and world history texts took over three months of full-time work. And the official reviewers are charged only with checking that the textbooks comply…
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…ve of an overbearing and despotic political structure. In keeping with the spirit of the Arab Spring, Free Arabs, therefore, proclaims an emancipated form of political and cultural citizenship. The site’s heavy reliance on art and satire to deliver its pungent critique of Islamist politics, cultural norms, and oppressive regimes indicates an emerging form of aesthetic disobedience which seeks aggressively to compete with dominant narratives of Ara…
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…er about her great-grandfather, a medicine man. Her interest in indigenous spirituality led to Ifà. For Cullors, spirituality saves souls. “When you are working with people who have been directly impacted by state violence and heavy policing in our communities, it is really important that there is a connection to the spirit world,” she said. “For me, seeking spirituality had a lot to do with trying to seek understanding about my conditions—how the…
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