Religion Dispatches
…tle to do with the worship of a marginalized Jew, named Jesus, who came to free the poor and oppressed. This counterfeit Christian community worships power, desires control, and imagines the world revolving around self-sufficient men (and a few women). I call it “Mad Man Religion.” Mad Man Religion looks just like Christianity. It connects religious practices to free market practices like you would connect pieces from a Lego set. And it offers to…
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…on the planet. The Wagner Leadership Institute is currently offering, for free, a one-hour lecture by Wagner, session number 4 of WLI course AP825 (the “AP” stands for “Apostles and Prophets”). For getting a basic understanding of the movement Wagner refers to, and has played a key role in catalyzing, one probably couldn’t do much better than to watch this lecture. C. Peter Wagner is a seasoned, professional educator… who aims to transform the bi…
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…s. White nationalists will support protectionist measures, and they oppose free trade in capital goods because they oppose free trade (or open borders) for labor. Whether or not they gain traction by claiming that the stock market and banks are controlled by Jews depends on whether people of goodwill are able to offer a more compelling vision of change. With Obama in the White House, I think we can expect more of the same, plus some. Some white na…
Read More…heon points out, there is a danger that when we understand ourselves to be promoting pluralism, we are enforcing a tacit division between “good” and “bad” religions (what Leonard Primiano called a “two-tiered model of religion”). A recent example is the fracas that occurred last year when The Satanic Temple offered to re-enact a black mass as part of a Harvard cultural studies club. The Temple’s multicultural performance was quickly reinterpreted…
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…s our enemies, and the latter constructs a false sense of independence and freedom.” I don’t know if we Americans, especially Christians in America, want to be freed from our demons. The late New Testament scholar Walter Wink defined the demonic as an array of human and supra-human forces aligned to destroy life. The demonic was both individual and structural, personal and collective, sentient and mechanical. Wink’s expansive way of writing about…
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…ng any distinctive rights or obligations: bye-bye to the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the Constitution, etc. They might as well protect us from the “establishment” of widget and the “free exercise” thereof. Both are meaningless, since neither “widget” nor “religion” point to anything specific. Linker, on the other hand, takes the exact opposite tack: he legislates the meaning of “religion” as those particular referents marked by the…
Read More…arket economics. One of the best examples is the Rev. Robert Sirico of the free market Acton Institute, who released a video attempting to defend his views against Evangelii Gaudium. Best “who, me?” line: “Who is advocating a market without regulations, without law?” On the Eternal Word Television Network program The World Over last week, Bishop Robert Morlino, the bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, discussed a portion of Evangelii Gaudium in which the…
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…; cooperation is perfectly possible, so it pays to make serious efforts to promote it, which means being responsive to the changing concerns of everyone else in the web. There are rights and wrongs done on every side; it makes no sense to measure how much blame accrues to any one side, because finger-pointing blocks the way to cooperation. Self-esteem comes from promoting cooperation; if self-esteem must depend on showing one’s strength (an open q…
Read More…daughter during her recital. • March 11, 1908, Boston, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Bailey Hardee was shot to death by Sarah Chamberlain Weed at the Laurens School, a finishing school in Boston. Weed then turned the gun on herself and committed suicide. • April 15, 1908, Asheville, North Carolina. Dr. C.O. Swinney shot and fatally wounded his 16-year-old daughter Nellie in a reception room at Normal and Collegiate Institute. He then committed suicide…
Read More…Public Integrity, the purpose of the company was to create Israel’s first “Free Export Processing Zone,” intended to promote business enterprise there. Contemporaneous news reports signaled the ideological heart of his efforts was to bring American-style conservatism to “socialist Israel:” “Israel is a country that was founded on statism, socialism and collectivism,” said David Yerushalmi, chairman and chief executive officer of the IEDC, which is…
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