Religion Dispatches
…ing will begin: Did the nomination of the Alaska governor help or hurt the ticket? Did playing solely to the base—religious conservatives in particular—limited the ticket’s appeal? Does the Party have to become more mainstream, more inclusive, and more tolerant? Is Palin to be the Party’s savior? Or, have the American people learned more than enough about some of the less-than-ethical ways she goes about her business? Everyone will have an opinion…
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…January, more than 1,200 people were summoned to the federal courthouse in Boston. These potential jurors in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s forthcoming trial were questioned in groups of 200 as the presiding judge winnowed the multitude down, and he has continued to do so in a second phase of questioning that began today. Although this process, called voir dire, is taking place in Massachusetts, which does not have the death penalty for state crimes, this is…
Read More…and refuge, as well as calling for as many people as possible to join the Boston Marathon next year, to show that Boston will not be cowed. There is no pattern that indicates when someone is going to do something as abhorrent as these brothers did. Ultimately, whenever we see acts of individuals like this, it’s because they see no other recourse for themselves; it could be Boston, Columbine, or Newtown. There are no excuses, but neither is there…
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…self-interrogation boiled, my hand extended to the right. I reached for my phone, but I found nothing. At first I laughed at my instinct, my muscle memory. The phone, with its glowing screen, gave me solace and control. But I was tied to my cushion for another hour, and in this ashram for another day, so email would have to wait. I panicked. My heart raced. Would my editor be asking for me? Would a reply from that politician’s secretary sit unansw…
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…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…
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…y from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art…
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…ine an “inclusive atmosphere.” And focusing on “interfaith” in the case of Boston might leave out of focus the complex, messy, harder-to-romanticize factors of this case. Immigration. Race. State surveillance. Access to emotional and economic support. Police presence in local neighborhoods. Teenage psychology. International relations in the War on Terror. Access to weapons. In their attempts to reach a larger base, mainstream interfaith projects s…
Read More…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…
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…ase “values voters”—even though he put Sarah Palin, an evangelical, on the ticket.” Boston pointed out that he expected that the major religious right organizations “will, in concert with secular far-right groups, attempt to destabilize the Obama administration early on by raising some contentious ‘culture war’ issue. This will be similar to what they and their GOP allies in Congress did to Bill Clinton over gays in the military back in 1993. The…
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…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
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