Religion Dispatches
…ng line of theological interventions in the most pressing moral problems of each successive generation. While Cox’s aim is certainly true, The Market as God misses the target….
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…dentity, a manhood purged of anything feminine. Consider the young purity crusaders I write about in chapter 13, “The Romance of American Fundamentalism.” They’re smart, hip, engaging kids; they scoff at the old Christian Right war chiefs, they live in Brooklyn and worship in Manhattan, they don’t like Bush—and they’re dedicated to an ideology that in its emphasis on “purity” above all is potentially farther right than anything Bush has ever dream…
Read More…rom the market, there is no freedom to be anything but at the mercy of the market. It’s almost impossible to be entirely free of the market these days, but it is possible, and politically feasible, to decouple social and market status. 2) The reason our political leaders can’t or won’t make the effort to think outside the market idolatry isn’t that they’re stupid or politically blind or sinful or corrupt or what-have-you, though they display all t…
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…ive multiplayer online role-playing game, and religious experiences in the online world of Second Life. In each of these examples, the level of immersion in online identity plays a very powerful role in shaping the authenticity of religious experience, as channeled through those digital representations of self that virtual natives call their avatars. Liquid Identity Avatars are digital representations of users that can be designed to fit within a…
Read More…rms declined, and continued to staff its booth at the East Lansing Farmers Market. Between the end of the 2016 farmers market season and the beginning of the 2017 season, the East Lansing Farmers Market updated its own vendor policies, adding a provision that stated vendors must comply with East Lansing’s non-discrimination ordinance. To submit an application, vendors had to agree to adhere to this policy not only while at the farmers market, but…
Read More…before about the far-right anti-abortion group’s willingness to bend the truth for attention. Just this year, the home of Personhood USA’s Keith Mason and his family was vandalized. The organization put out a press release blaming “abortion fanatics,” who had forced the Masons into hiding. But when asked about the incident, a police spokesperson said the ‘person of interest’ in the case had personal—not political—motivations. The group also has a…
Read More…on. I’ve created my own tradition. In my family, we have a fresh, chopped fruit salad. I admit, there is something extra special about handling the fruit while fasting. All that slicing and dicing into tiny bite-size pieces is almost as delicious as the first bite after the fasting day is over. Sometimes when I break fast somewhere else, I feel like something is missing; even if the dates are there to simulate uniformity. Now these small variants…
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…imilar to the Wailing Wall’s email service. Worshipers email a prayer to Jerusalem, where it is printed out by a courier and inserted into the wall on their behalf. If they still wish to pray “at” the wall via computer, 24-hour webcams record what is happening on location. But is it really the same thing to email a message to someone who inserts it in the wall on your behalf as to go there yourself? Is God “closer” if you visit the physical wall t…
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…ng James translation Bible in an “easy-to-read” format, the “God Bless the USA Bible” (GBUSA) also includes: the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and The Pledge of Allegiance. Of course, the GBUSA isn’t the first to make an explicit connection between the Bible and the founding documents of the US. The American Patriot’s Bible (2009) features the New King James translation paired with inserts on Christian theol…
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…marriage in Homosexuality in Islam. And, of course this is a big issue in today’s news. I admit I sometimes find the marriage equality movement—and the movement for inclusion in the military—paradoxical. On the one hand, of course I want the full rights of citizenship and I am lucky enough to be living in New York! On the other hand, I think of these as two very conservative institutions that got critiqued in serious ways by progressives in my li…
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