Religion Dispatches
…, eating, making bad puns. When he was gone, did they first remember his list of religious instructions? Did they remember his debating points against his adversaries? Eventually they remembered these things. But first they remembered the Good Shepherd. Archaeology shows that long before the cross became the symbol of the church, his symbol was the picture of the shepherd with the lost lamb wrapped over his shoulders. His words were remembered,…
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…parkly lights can make any dive feel like home. So, Cheers has to make the list for great Christmas episodes. Limiting myself to only one Saturday Night Live sketch, the best would have to be Alec Baldwin’s Schewddy Balls. As much as Christmas is about humor, it’s also about the warm and fuzzies. Nothing delivers the warm and fuzzies (along with pubescent awkwardness) better than The Wonder Years. Speaking of awkward, the most awkwardl…
Read MoreVia Joe Sudbay, here’s a list of the 94 House Republicans (so far) who have lined up to co-sponsor a resolution demanding that President Obama defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. Sudbay points out that ye olde conventional wisdom says tea partiers only care about taxes and government spending, once again, their actions disprove that theory. As the Public Religion Research Institute showed last year, tea party adherents are much more like…
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…the time since the last digitally-integrated confession and including the list of sins clicked in the examination of conscience. Once the penitent reviews her or his sins (logged in the Examination of Conscience option), the app invites the recitation of “Act of Contrition” prayer, after which she or he is instructed to “Receive absolution and respond ‘Amen.’” Going perhaps more grammatical here than I am truly able anyway, I’d merely note that t…
Read More…raging religious leaders to devote their sermons to the environment. For a list of participating places of worship near you, go here. From the Clergy Letter Project’s statement: Religious people from many diverse faith traditions and locations around the world understand that evolution is quite simply sound science; and for them, it does not in any way threaten, demean, or diminish their faith in God. In fact, for many, the wonders of science ofte…
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…ple cash their paychecks—perhaps they even follow Doug Scott’s LDI boycott list in their daily shopping—go home and tune in to EWTN, read the latest blogs and decide what to pontificate about tonight. They don’t act, and they don’t worry anymore about results, except those which will be occasionally delivered through prayer. If we could pray away abortion, however, it would have been over a long time ago. And those are just a few examples. All of…
Read MoreA creationist textbook publisher in Texas has withdrawn its name from a list of those planning on submitting supplemental materials for adoption by the Texas Board of Education. The Foundation for Thought and Ethics had thrown its name into the ring in November for the Texas Education Agency, saying that it intended to submit materials to be used in state biology classes. In 2009, the Board of Education approved new standards to its state biology…
Read More…ulations to which we have been exposed during the past year.” First on his list of such tribulations, and made damningly ironic in this, the Vatican’s self-styled Year for Priests, is the fact that “in this year of all years and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of the abuse of minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its antithesis, and under the mantle of sacred protection profoundly wound human persons in t…
Read More…f internet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story a…
Read More…Uganda” over the bill, I asked him how the U.N. and other “lobbyists” were promoting homosexuality in Uganda; not surprisingly, he didn’t have an answer. He claimed that the pastors there told him “a story about how it swept into — the agenda promotion, of the agenda, and now the actual proliferation of the homosexual activity sweeping into the boarding schools of that nation. I don’t know much of the details so I can’t take responsibility for wha…
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