Religion Dispatches
…ttle-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of the urban poor are losing their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help from his Democratic “friends” on this one, and for the same reason: They likewi…
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…n North Carolina. Referring to Bakker’s theological “feel-good stance” as “cheap grace,” Rev. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League attributed Bakker’s preaching of a “toxic and counterfeit gay-affirming gospel” to being injured by the church as a child. “In some ways he’s right,” Bakker told me in response. “It’s called empathy.” He continued: “Every time someone accuses me of cheap grace, I go back and say no, it’s free grace. Grace is free…
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…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…
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…craftsmen’s guilds of stonemasons in late medieval Britain. Like most artisans, men who built in stone wanted to limit their craft to those who had been properly trained, and so created a guild with a system of secret words and signs by which master craftsmen could identify one another. Masons were mobile, traveling long distances to the building sites of castles and cathedrals. They were detached from ordinary medieval society and regarded with…
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…works.” Such savvy, so removed from MIT or the complexity theorists at the Santa Fe Institute, runs in tension with Bousquet’s master narrative that links scientific war-making with elite scientific fads. But works like Olivier Roy’s Globalized Islam show how network-consciousness has infiltrated contemporary Muslim cultures through informal theology, preached from Jakarta to London in audio lectures and online forums. The traditional concept of t…
Read More…not more to this story than has been reported, I think they might be successful.” Parker signaled today that she was surprised by the breadth of the subpoenas and suggested that they may be narrowed. According to the Wall Street Journal, the mayor’s spokesperson said in a statement: Mayor Parker agrees with those who are concerned about the city legal department’s subpoenas for pastor’s sermons. The subpoenas were issued by pro bono attorneys help…
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…the minister, the birthplace of a new way of resistance and the “most transformative” experience of his life. Before 2014, McBride was not an activist, he explained. He was a spectator to the rising din of police brutality activism, and had “never protested a day in his life” until he came to Ferguson, he said. Now he has been to Ferguson for protest actions eight times, has been arrested by Missouri police, and leads regular trips to the area in…
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…rdileone garnered national criticism for attempting to do just that in the San Francisco diocesan schools, which would have also required teachers to follow a “morality clause,” meaning that they would obey church teachings even outside of the classroom. The San Francisco archdiocese eventually dropped the effort, but reclassifying theology faculty and graduate students in this manner means not only that they’ll be blocked from unionizing, but tha…
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…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…
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…t was a midrash on the old me. So I went ahead with the transgressive, transformative Haggadah that eventually was called “The Freedom Seder.” In 1969 it was published in Ramparts magazine, where tens of thousands greeted it with joy: a religion they could share! And on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of Dr. King’s murder and the third night of Passover, we held a Freedom Seder in the basement of a Black church in Washington DC, with about 80…
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