Religion Dispatches
…ill resort to appeals to faith, but: The religious right has given the secular-humanist-atheist community a huge opening: by placing conservative religious doctrine front and center in the healthcare debate, they have raised serious constitutional questions about what religious freedom and church-state separation mean. Many of the organizations and activists who are part of a coalition of church-state separation advocates have long done stellar wo…
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…l genres into something entirely new. In memorializing Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan lauded his friend’s virtuosity in American music: “There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school.” Culturally, the Grateful Dead embraced the spirit of Americana, a spirit of possibility and freedom. As the band moved from the margin…
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…f the National Guard, who were on-site for the entirety of this weekend’s planned and unplanned actions. A brief note: I spoke with Dr. Robyn hours before President Trump issued a statement that called racism “evil” and did include one explicit mention of “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups” who inflict “racist violence.” But that statement, like other equivocating comments from the White House this weekend, also took pa…
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…feces smeared all over their floors and carpets, although I’m sure a great number of non-Muslims appreciate these artifacts from guests’ shoes. As mentioned previously, shoes are also used to discipline people. Belt-whuppins are difficult when men’s traditional garb does not include belts. Shoes/slippers/etc. are far more common. They are used to help “enlighten” insouciant, arrogant, oblivious, destructive, or otherwise socially maladjusted indiv…
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…64, the biggest gulf in Christianity between how it was practiced in the Atlantic Archipelago (what most call the British Isles) and in Rome concerned the calculation for Easter’s date (the former timed it with Passover, as the Orthodox still do). There were some other differences as well, including the style of tonsure, or haircut, worn by Irish monks, but otherwise the faith as believed by Christians in northwestern Europe was the essentially th…
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…sing 2000 pounds (thanks to the diet shakes he was selling) deserve first place? Does his blaming 9/11 on LGBTQ people merit only fourth place? How can we forget Robertson praying for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court Justices? Pondering such matters led me to a comment thread about Robertson on Salon.com. Amid the predictable responses (much hateful mocking, a few claims that he was quoted out of context, and conflations of his Christianity wit…
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