Religion Dispatches
…more close relationships than non-SNS users. * Facebook users get more social support than non-SNS users. * Facebook revives “dormant” relationships that are lost to non-SNS users. After a couple years of being derided for their brain-rotted shallowness, it should come as no surprise that in no time at all, my network of witty Facebook and Twitter friends added to the list of laudable social networking aficionado qualities: * We floss after every…
Read More
…hrough rites of passage. These are peculiar rites to be sure, even as they mimic broad structures of separation, transition, and reincorporation found in initiation rites the world over. From Face-to-Face to Interface Reviewing the film in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis tells us, “instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life—and ours—into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the huma…
Read More
…elf and repudiate Hagee’s endorsement. Hagee slunk off the national stage. Flash forward to September of last year. McCain (now the GOP’s presidential candidate) chooses a relatively obscure political figure, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, as his running mate. When a CNN reporter asked a GOP campaign spokesperson about Palin’s religious beliefs, she would only say that “the Republican vice presidential candidate has ‘deep religious convictions.’” Wi…
Read More…rn,” Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) (http://www.traditionalvalues.org/) continues its series of anti-Obama bomb throwing. TVC is also a bit miffed that Oprah has refused to interview Sarah Palin on her television program and has collected 4,000 letters critical of Oprah’s decision. Religious Left Book Launch: The book launch for “Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America,” a series of essays…
Read More
…is the seamless manner in which a hackneyed 14-month-old movie becomes the flashpoint for violence against American officialdom in the Arab Muslim world, and that it came both on the anniversary of 9/11 and during an intense presidential election season. The two issues at stake are opposite: 1) Freedom of speech, which includes the freedom to poach on the fine line between public critique and satire (allowed), and defamation or hate speech (not al…
Read More
…this project moving without delay, shall we? Again, I appreciate that you’ve got your hands full with the Muslims right now. But you also know that you and the Administration in general will look better if you add some balance by also supporting appropriate surveillance of the Christian problem people. I hate to see the faith that I love be stained by the actions of a few, and I’m more than willing to do my part! Yours sincerely, (Rev.) Peter Laa…
Read More
…Meyer with images of his deceased six-year-old daughter, his complaints of algorithmic cruelty went viral. Other users related similar experiences. Indeed, researchers have begun to ask whether the vast storage capacity of networked technologies threaten to send us unsuspectingly into a tailspin of regret similar to that suffered by old man Krapp. Life-logging devices like Autographer, Memoto, and SixthSense aim to capture every waking moment. Goo…
Read More
…slopes upward toward the North Pole, where a small gas jet powers an Eternal Gospel Flame.” [Inside Climate News] On the lighter side of the end times is Zoltan Istvan’s curious but compelling think piece that asks, “When Superintelligent AI Arrives, Will Religions Try to Convert It?” (Bonus: my interview with Istvan, during which the presidential hopeful is pressed on whether Transhumanism is itself a religious movement.) [Gizmodo] Convergence…
Read More
…he drama of misrecognition in the GBarn continues in its account of his trial, culminating with an account of the crucifixion in which Judas ironically deems God’s judgment unjust: Whereupon they condemned two robbers with him to the death of the cross. So they led him to Mount Calvary, where they used to hang malefactors, and there they crucified him naked, for the greater ignominy. Judas truly did nothing else but cry out: ‘God, why hast thou fo…
Read More
…s to certain furry mammals, we all agree that a specific instant in the temporal flux should be designated as “7:00 a.m.” But unlike the contracts of language, the contract of universal time was invented by groups of people, working toward specific goals. Who wrote the terms of that contract? How, exactly, did humanity go from scattered local times to a global system in the span of a couple generations? That transition is the subject of Vanessa Og…
Read More