Religion Dispatches
…od news. Boeing, the US’s largest airplane manufacturer, has won two jumbo deals involving the Muslim world. Both will help them compete with European Airbus while sustaining or creating thousands of American jobs—up to an estimated 127,000. That’s Muslim money buying American goods, creating American jobs. That’s us benefiting from growth in the Gulf and Southeast Asia. That’s the world growing together. The Muslim world’s democratic convulsions—…
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…of administration cronies, and began reshaping how the federal government deals with the needs of the poor. Despite the administration’s ceaseless touting of its “compassionate conservativism” and its desire to unleash “armies of compassion” to deal with the nation’s social ills, Bush’s faith-based initiatives never made it out of Congress; no effective legislation was passed. Team Bush was able to establish Faith-Based and Community offices at e…
Read More…has framed Fundamentalism as a confounding of mythos–a way of knowing that deals with meaning and the experience of being human–with logos–a pragmatic and empirical way of knowing. By pitting Genesis against scientific theories, Creationists have tacitly conceded to materialist claims that scripture is only of value if it is true in a historic and scientific sense. By claiming Creationism is “true science,” the Northwest Science Museum ironically…
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…Bram Stoker’s Dracula may recall that The Count is a master at real estate deals, acquiring multiple lairs throughout London.) When Fox and CNN scrambled to cover the story, Rodgers was asked to come to a satellite office in Philadelphia. He commented, “The network anchors didn’t see me until we were about to go live. I don’t know if they even noticed my fangs, to be honest.” The resulting interviews were rather surreal, resembling a scene from HB…
Read More…lation. Singapore: Gay blogger fined for questioning court; trans activist deals with fame Alex Au, a prominent blogger was fined for questioning the high court’s timing in hearing two constitutional challenges to the law banning gay sex. According to the Associated Press, “The 62-year-old blogger is one of the few dissidents who continually tests the limits of Singapore’s closely policed media environment. He is gay himself and in his writings ha…
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…had written? Which one? Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. He tells the best scholarly stories without relinquishing any of the depth or nuance. What’s your next book? It’s another Southern gospel book, this time built around original research data generated by an ethnographic survey I conducted in the research phase of the first book project. Right now, it’s titled The Gospel Sensibility: Faith, Fallibility and Feeling in American Sacred Song…
Read More…d Glaser says in Sasseen’s piece—that legislators like Frank who cut sweet deals for well-heeled interests are merely “bowing to reality.” Yes, but here is where some prophetic imagination is needed, because it is an unholy reality that these same insiders and lobbyists have created. What the lobbyists choose to call “political reality” translates into the reality of a Congress that is utterly beholden to them. So it really doesn’t matter if the…
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…reason I cannot and will not leave the church alone: it continues to exert its influence in areas that affect my life and the lives of people I love. Most of what I have written recently about the church deals with gender and sex; as long as the church has opinions that move it to action on these topics, I will have opinions on the church’s actions, which I claim the right to express….
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…voting for whatever party,” says Cuevas Ortiz. If the PRI indeed cut some deals, they served the party well. In the midst of Mexico’s anti-abortion drive in 2009, six states—five of which now possess abortion-related constitutional reforms—held governor elections. PRI politicians won five posts, pushing out the PAN in three states. Beyond backroom dealings, Mexican politicians know which public maneuvers will draw the Church’s good graces. Before…
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…we speak of the beauty and worth of the earth beyond the art of for-profit deals? We must slow down, notice each sparrow that falls, each oil spill, each emission of CO2, each species lost for all time, each hungry and thirsty person in the food deserts of negligence and racism, each island nation drowning under the selfish inaction of self-made men. We must slow down, notice each song sung, each coalition formed, each appreciation of tragic beaut…
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