Religion Dispatches
…t in conceiving of energy differently from the coal and iron barons of his time—or from the petro-potentates of our own—in speaking of energy as “eternal delight.” If we could experience a dramatic conversion in that way I think that God’s great heart would rejoice—and I know for sure that Mother Earth would smile to see her prodigal children finally repent of their profligate ways and begin to live with a lick of sense….
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…e authority above them. “Submission has a military air,” she writes in The Way Home. “For the greater good, the soldier is subject to his commanding officer, even if he disagrees with him.” She continues: This generation is in danger of forgetting that the Christian way of life is still a war. We have strong enemies—the world, the flesh, the devil. We also have a commander in chief, Jesus Christ, who has created a winning battle strategy. Jesus is…
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…get slotted into the narrative of decline: “If everything were right, the way it was supposed to be, the way it used to be then we wouldn’t have to be dealing with this problem.” So, a lot gets loaded on the shoulders of LGBT people. They become a symbol that’s not about them after a while. It’s about anxieties about cultural decline and moral confusion, Christendom fading, American religious pluralism, you name it. The story of LGBT people is a…
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…ical force, in 16 and Pregnant and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. And along the way, an understanding of the camera’s truth-telling potential, its ability to illuminate the real by means of filming people in carefully arranged, constraining circumstances, became a taken-for-granted of contemporary life. “Reality television” isn’t just a genre or an industry; it becomes shorthand for a way of seeing reality through film. “What does it mean to film reali…
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…conversation about Christianity in the United States, we must consider the ways in which Christian hegemony harms others, including through its normalization of Christian extremism. Instead of systematically silencing the voices of leavers, nonbelievers, and religious minorities in discussing Christianity and “religious freedom,” any serious discourse on these matters must include us as stakeholders in hashing out a fair and equitable approach to…
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…amous fundamentalist Mormons and mainstream Mormons still is. Yes, and the way polygamy was banned by the mainstream LDS Church in connection with Utah statehood means, I think, that the question of polygamy will always track politically. And polygamy as an eternal doctrine has not been negated among mainstream LDS people. It’s a very live idea still. Some orthodox Mormons expect to live it in heaven. So much of all faith is not now but later. Mai…
Read More…onally and a very efficient way to touch a lot of countries in a concerted way and in an aggressive way is the United Nations.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry issued a formal apology for discrimination against LGBT employees during the “Lavender Scare,” which included decades of purges of gay men and lesbians working at the State Department and other federal government agencies. The anti-choice and anti-LGBT LifeSiteNews has run a two-part ser…
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…d the editor of The Cosmopolitan Lyceum. It was, “the information superhighway of the 1840s and ’50s.” Today, TED differs from the lyceum circuit in a few key ways. TED talks are mostly consumed on a screen, and while TED has a circuit of local events (the TEDx program), talks are one-off experiences. Plus, they’re capped at eighteen minutes while Lyceum lectures were a little longer. “They’d happily listen to someone talk about Napoleon for an ho…
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…al lives—whether liberal or conservative—tend to rub other folks the wrong way, as though they were holding them in constant judgment. It turns out to be super easy to turn people off by talking about ethics and morals. It’s not wrong to talk about your values. I do it all the time! But you have to approach it sideways, with a sense of humor and surprise. Giving someone an unexpected reason to buy into a value works much better than a blunt, confr…
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…to that: The one who shares in the covenant is supposed to make known the ways and ordinances of God to later generations so that they remember as well. One striking thing about the content of the tradition is its humility. We might expect a nation’s founding stories to be of glory and victory, but Deuteronomy wants the people to remember something different: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt…” The focus isn’t just that the L…
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