Religion Dispatches
…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
Read More…ne of ECI’s board members, Rachel Abrams posted inflammatory, borderline-insane rants about Palestinians being “devil spawn” on her blog. Unsurprisingly, the center-left Jewish organization J Street has called on the saner folk at ECI to cut dies, disavow, etc, and if they don’t, for other Jewish organizations like AIPAC and the ADL to distance themselves from ECI. This last step should have been taken long ago. ECI, as critics point out, is no mo…
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…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …
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…was caught after the murder, fleeing halfway across the state, he had the phone number of an Operation Rescue leader on his dashboard—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader connections he’d built with anti-abortion extremists. The church, Roeder would later testify, emerged as the only place he could find a shot at Tiller, around the elaborate security measures the doctor had learned to follow at his clinic and home. “Justifiable homicide…
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…y mostly older colleagues was sometimes a challenge. In my late 20s, I was lost in the sea of 40,000 students from all over the world. One afternoon, desperate for advice, I went to the office of my colleague Steve Tollefson, and we had one of those long, rambling conversations about teaching that inevitably forks into other topics. Steve was in his 50s, but he could talk to anyone, from 18-year-old freshmen to emeriti faculty in their 70s and 80s…
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…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
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…aches of the Vatican walls. Some of us will keep trying to tell these kinds of stories. But with fewer secular organizations supporting that kind of journalism, those stories will increasingly get lost. With that loss, the agency of the laity in the church is lessened, and the power of the people at the top of the church to seize and control the narrative grows….
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…onal criminal network that originated among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles during the gang wars of the 1980s. Since then, United States deportation policies have transported MS-13 back to Central America, with the strongest networks forming in the postwar countries of Guatemala and El Salvador. Tens of thousands of men and women, many of whom are former soldiers, now smuggle drugs, participate in human trafficking, and control prison s…
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…ans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place….
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…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…
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