Religion Dispatches
…orde France and proceeded to destroy with hammers and picks any ecclesiastical art that they came across. They toppled statues of Mary and the saints, destroyed crucifixes, smashed stain glassed windows, and defaced tombs. It was not an isolated incident, indeed it triggered a wave of iconoclastic fury that radiated north from France into the Low Countries, with cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and hospitals all targeted for destruction. One wit…
Read More…, in turn, responded that O’Malley and Sanders weren’t very respectful themselves, talking over and down to the BLM folks, and repeating the “All lives matter” slogan that many find objectionable. Some thoughts: 1. Anybody surprised that activists at an activist convention would do activist things is a damn fool. For fuck’s sake, Netroots Nation’s first patron wrote a book titled Crashing the Gates. Of course things get a bit rowdy from time to ti…
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…ite The Exorcist Effect? Over twenty years ago, Michael Cuneo wrote a book called American Exorcism, arguing that William Friedkin’s The Exorcist had almost single-handedly brought about a revival of exorcism in America. We think Cuneo was generally correct, but it’s hard to actually prove this claim. In fact, one acquisitions editor who approached us to write “something” about exorcism told us he was no longer interested in our project because it…
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…he case as long as we continue, from bathrooms to ID cards, to organize ourselves around the gender binary. Writing for Type Investigations, Sarah Posner argues that bills banning medical care to trans youth are rooted in what she calls “baseless distortions of science and medicine.” Citing the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Associa…
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…tten rules, of course, because the “ethics code” this Supreme Court gave itself isn’t worth the paper it was written on. But I—and, judging from the reactions, most political commentators—had presumed there might be some rules that are so self-evident even Sam Alito wouldn’t break them. Such as: A Supreme Court Justice should a) not support an insurrection and b) not feel comfortable enough to show his support of said insurrection publicly. So, wh…
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…points back to the press pen, the metal cage into which the media herds itself at every Trump rally, too lazy to rethink the old political rules Trump’s gamed to turn them into a prop—“and say, ‘he said a horrible thing.’” The crowd laughs. It’s funny, if you’re a Trumper, because it’s true. It’s a subtle move, because it is true, all of it at once: the felon does not care; and he says what he says to bait the press; and the press will take the b…
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…t effect). I remember looking around in astonishment and raised the rhetorical question to myself “where is David Gergen talking about, because almost everyone around me is white?!” CNN was doing real-time roll calls of the states’ voting patterns. Whenever Obama was projected to have won a state, cheers rang out. When a state was called for McCain there were boos and silent pauses. I had not ever thought it would be possible to sense that many pe…
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…t now be an integral part of progressive Catholicism. Full disclosure: I myself lectured on the achievements of the movement, especially our success in avoiding being coopted by a kyriarchal church. Ordination is a stated goal that some Catholic women have reached by taking the ordination process into their own hands, as with Roman Catholic Womenpriests and the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests. The movement’s major achievements include…
Read More…hout the region continue to turn to God in prayers asking for help. Dr. Russell Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminar keeps up his evangelical crusade to go green. But at First Things, R. R. Reno asks, why all this evangelical fuss now? And what is especially Christian about Christian ecology? Lauri Lebo points out that not everyone involved in the cleanup is an evangelical Christian. Some of them just used to be. Malaysia is abuzz about t…
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…have sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Following the footsteps of Russell Simmons but doing it bigger and deffer, Jay-Z is the consummate businessman. In fact, he’s a business, man. Jay-Z credits his success to his hustler mentality, but he doesn’t stop there… His Blueprint albums reference his power of creation—the divine ability to manifest something out of nothing as God did when he spoke the world into existence. He describes himself as…
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