Religion Dispatches
…ginning of a journey that will have them owning a Christian theme park, an airline, a series of television stations; they will be the first to colonize another planet. Each new revelation is greeted with enthusiastic shouts and frenzied applause. Throughout it all, Jacobs’ camera captures, with stark verité detachment, the trials of the small community making the film, and dwells on the character of its leader. Who is Pastor Richard Gazowsky? Is h…
Read More…work. The problem is what happens if the woman/women won’t cooperate. As one news source described a recent outburst: “Hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jewish men delayed takeoff of a transatlantic flight by refusing to sit next to women, and then caused chaos once it was airborne [by standing in the aisles for the entire flight and refusing to occupy their seats].” Obviously a congested plane aisle isn’t the end of the world (although one can imagine…
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…icipation in the City Council of Glen Cove at the time of the 1990 Avianca airline crash in the nearby Long Island town of Cove Neck—a flight from Columbia to New York that ran out of fuel as it was held circling JFK airport awaiting permission to land, killing 73. In the midst of a subsequent council meeting, the mayor of Glen Cove sequentially cited the heroics of local emergency workers for responding to the crash, and then lamented the presenc…
Read More…t as toxic. Every Sunday I sit in church in chairs with people from this generation, everyone within 2 or 3 years of being my grandparents. By osmosis they’ve gotten some of the cynicism of their boomer children, but nothing on the wikipedia and snopes.com level of my own age. The X-Files was our Walter Cronkite— the truth is out there somewhere beyond the veil — beyond governments and big business, politicians and fat-cats. And the internet only…
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…familiar with the same rhetorical language that’s been used for decades. One need look no further than 93-year-old Billy Graham’s endorsement of Amendment 1 to realize that the terms of this debate are firmly rooted deeply in the past. “For me, it’s heartbreaking that we’re still having this conversation,” Bakker said, noting conservative Christianity’s continued insistence on law and regulation and divisiveness. “I wish people lived life on life…
Read More…kend, prompting Majority leader Steny Hoyer to issue a statement: “On the one hand, I am saddened that America’s debate on health care—which could have been a national conversation of substance and respect—has degenerated to the point of such anger and incivility. But on the other, I know that every step toward a more just America has aroused similar hate in its own time; and I know that John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement, has learned…
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…ike to see themselves as having a monopoly on truth; they see that they alone are the one true faith. But this is egotism and has nothing to do with true religion, which is about the abandonment of the ego. Too often it seems that religious people are not necessarily more compassionate, more tolerant, more peaceful, or more spiritual than others. America, for example, is a very religious country, and at the same time it is the most unequal sociall…
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…obe and Mail essay, however, the land that settlers imagined as free wilderness was neither free nor empty. And, they write, the deadly effects of the myths of settler masculinity persist today, as the trial of Colten Boushie’s killer showed. Even if Mennonites thought they had found a pacifist’s paradise in the prairies, their deeds to the land came at the price of violence to Indigenous peoples who still understood the land as their own. Mennoni…
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…is still engaged in that most hopeful of all human activities—raising the next generation—and feels confident that it can do so right here in Quitman. Yet there were a perplexing number of Antique and Gift Shops, the sorts of thing that normally require a significant tourist industry or leisure class to support. That kind of shopping takes place on the weekends, yet all but one store on Main Street in Quitman was closed this Sunday. I was especia…
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…ustomer who, after they moved to Las Vegas, eventually became her pimp. “I never knew when I got older that I would be a prostitute,” Lobért says. “I wanted to be like the stars. I wanted to have happiness like they did… I thought the casinos looked so beautiful, the glamour and the glitz of it all, the showgirls and the shows, and the movie stars… that was so alluring to me.” During her time in the industry, Lobért certainly experienced the glamo…
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