Religion Dispatches
…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
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…ion by joining other denominations or leaving Christianity altogether. The number of priests and nuns was at an all-time low even before the recent sexual scandals, and the number of self-identified Catholics world-wide keeps declining. Many of those who remain in the Church ignore standard doctrines and believe what they want. How many Catholics disobey Church rules? About as many as the angels dancing on a pinhead. Believers know that Jesus prom…
Read More…Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Sen. Obama is still operative.’ He has not replied. Donohue’s statement continued: It would appear, then, that the group no longer exists. It is not hard to understand why. After being criticized by the Catholic League, Archbishop Joseph Naumann…
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…ne so, local observers are feeling the impact. “I have a firm grasp on the number of Heather Scott supporters in my district,” Abbott says, “and in two years, from roughly 2018 to 2020, her base has increased roughly from 3800 to 6000. That’s quite a jump, and it’s definitely correlated to new residents.” When asked where the new residents came from, Abbott explains, “We have an active community of American Redoubters who advertise our area in pub…
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…or sell for under two dollars). And unlike the internet, the space of the iPhone feels not just private, but personal. Yes, the iPhone might be my means of connection with the world—it is, after all, a phone—but it is also my own little password-locked garden that I carry with me wherever I go. Moreover, I can remake the landscape with a few flicks of my fingers whenever I choose. As a result, the territory necessarily mixes the sacred and the pro…
Read More…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…
Read More…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…
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…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…
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…cause it’s more potent.) And yet, when faced with the choice, I most often buy what’s natural. The expensive stuff comes from a plant. It’s real. “It’s probably better for me and for the world,” I think, without a modicum of supporting evidence. “There’s a picture of a flower right there on the package.” The allure of naturalness isn’t limited to the grocery store. From diet and medicine to childbirth and economics, we assume that natural is good…
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…an fiction (the most famous of which became Fifty Shades of Grey), and buy buy buy branded Twilight merchandise between the release of the books and movies to keep the magic of the series alive. They “Twi-bond,” supporting one another in times of need (TwilightMoms, an online group of moms who read Twilight, ritually send one another cards and gifts when others in their lives forget to), and they study “Cullenism,” the value system of the Cullens,…
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