Religion Dispatches
Cizik sizes up McCain He oversees governmental affairs and is the chief lobbyist of the 30-million-member Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Evangelicals, this year he was named by TIME magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, he’s a Republican, and he’s a leader in the Creation Care movement—a Christian evangelical response to global warming. He is Richard Cizik and he’s a longtime friend of Sen. John McCain. These…
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…ear their fingertips on guitar strings and scream unintelligibly into microphones. All the elements of the indie scene announce themselves: the spiky haircuts, the leather, combat boots, the wide eyes, the acne. At one recent show, Matt Koldinski… took the mike and did something that would be unthinkable at most hardcore shows. Panting and solemn, he appealed to his audience of peers to come up to him after the show, to talk about their problems a…
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…malayas and studied the animal and plant life and their surrounding water, air, and soil. It was as we were walking down the mountain from the highest elevation that I started talking with Dhondup (several of the monks and nuns are fluent in English). I was interested in why he was participating in this project and in how he handled issues that came up that were at odds with his Buddhist beliefs. “I am studying modern science, because I believe it…
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…clause strikes again. In this latest episode, according to bloggers at Hot Air and the American Conservative, “[t]he Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that a priest must testify in a case about what he heard in a confessional,” and “Fr. Bayhi will have to go to jail to protect the seal of the confessional.” These pundits can, to some extent, be forgiven for these misleading statements since the Catholic Church’s Baton Rouge Diocese has made some f…
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…A judge struck down the warning stickers as unconstitutional because it unfairly targeted evolution for special scrutiny. “I think it speaks to a religious purpose, one of the prongs of the Lemon test,” said Steve Newton. The hot-button issues of human cloning (a code word for abortion, Newton says) and global warming are linked to increase the appearance of evolution’s controversy. Fostering Fear of Science The science blog Denialism has a list…
Read More…d them. He prepared a large figure from clay, and with the help of others, combined the four elements, air, earth, wind and water, into this creation. Finally, Rabbi Yehuda wrote the secret name of God on a piece of paper and placed it in the Golem’s mouth, at which point it came alive. Now it was a sin to create life in this manner, for only God was empowered to create life outside of regular procreation, but the Golem defended the people. Each n…
Read More…man—he calls him Amir—is describing how he was tortured. Amir pushes his chair back from the table where he is sitting and says, “They hang me this way.” Flynn describes what happens next: [Amir] raises his arms out to his side as if crucified in the air. Something about him standing, about his body suddenly rising up, completely unhinges me, something that makes his words real in a way they hadn’t been before. At this moment I get it: these words…
Read More…clable was put in the wrong container, I would take it out, hold it in the air, and repeat the same speech, “This is a recycle house. Look, my generation won’t feel this as much as yours, you know. I’m doing this for you.” As a public lecturer, when I was handed a styrofoam cup I made the same speech: “these things do not bio-degrade, you know?” I had repeated it more than once in the same place when once, a Muslim sister said to me, “keep saying…
Read More…eling bruised and bullied. Ads like these were unleashed in budget-busting numbers—$250 million or more by some estimates—by the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision which lifted spending limits on corporations, unions, and individuals. Are the multimillion dollar ads and the financial heavyweights who anonymously back them the new bullies of the US political process? Do they use their size and unequal access to resources to dominate ot…
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…al fundraiser I’d attended the previous week. Also unlike the Episcopal affair, I did not spot a single same-sex couple. I began to wonder how much fun these people, freed from religion’s rules, were having with their liberty. But there was quite a bit of rational discourse about politics, which I enjoyed, and not everyone was blaming our beleaguered president for the state of the economy. It is an older crowd—not so old as the Episcopalians, mind…
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