Religion Dispatches
…prevailing sense of early 21st century LDS institutional life is that the best way to deal with such anxieties is to push through them, and that the best expression of the faith is the projection of a sense of assurance as polished and attractive as the storefronts at City Creek Mall. That’s how most Mormons plan to walk through what may very well be a season of public relations nightmares, as Romney’s GOP candidacy brings even greater scrutiny t…
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…ited States. I want to live as an expat, returning to visit my family from time to time. I won’t miss much. I won’t miss the horrible cable news, or the sanctimonious preachers, or the respectability blacks who wish we’d all just get out of the streets and stop protesting. I won’t miss the well-meaning white people who try to commiserate, but won’t have a substantive conversation, or commit to fighting for justice and equality for brown and black…
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…ng, our lifestyle, hardly at all. I’d like to think that we’d maintain the best of the past, and merge it with the best of the present. More steak, but still antibiotics. I really think there is a module in our brains, a neurological assembly, that says steak is really good, or meat is really good for us. I mean, it is the best kind of thing to eat. We have mental constructs about what is an attractive woman or what is an attractive man, for matin…
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…Participants returned to a local park to listen to Conference on their cellphones—the first time in history that Church officials permitted broad media access to the event, a move some have characterized as a concession to ticket requests from Ordain Women leaders. Inside the Tabernacle and the nearby Conference Center, rows of seats went unfilled. Saturday’s Ordain Women action has initiated an unprecedented conversation about power, leadership,…
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…respective empires, the pope and Time seem made for each other. The first time Time put a pope on its cover—June 16, 1924—it tried to split the difference between the era’s rampant anti-Catholicism and the “Great Man” narratives that were then its stock and trade. Beneath an illustration depicting Pope Pius XI as bespectacled, human, and approachable (literally soft around the edges, thanks to the artist’s light touch), there appeared words offer…
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…ut the numbers after all. March for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent…
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…the dominant brand of today’s Republican Party. For good reason, a growing number of expert observers have begun sounding the alarm. I suggest it’s time we hit the panic button. The rally featured plenty of repugnant elements—from the relentless attacks on transgender youth consistent with fascist scapegoating, to the steady drumbeat of election fraud claims, to accusations that Dr. Fauci engineered Covid-19 in a Chinese lab to help a demonic caba…
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…s a philosophy student, a grad student, a PhD. I did very well, was at the best colleges, best universities— Harvard, Yale—and I was willing to undertake preparing myself to teach such a course. Philosophers generally don’t want to come anywhere near that kind of stuff—nor did I. But I honorably tried to prepare myself. It meant I had to read theologians, Christian writers like St. Augustine—whom I had hated. You see in my book where I talk about…
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…on of their wealth in charity, Thoreau called foul. “It may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.” He went on to use a striking analogy, “It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday’s liberty for the rest.” Slave-breeder is, of course, a polite term for one who perpetrated…
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…itch. But it seems that Bakker is more willing to play partisan games this time around. Even his wife, Lori, has come out in support of Trump, claiming that he’s the best candidate for women. Apocalyptic preaching isn’t new, and Bakker is appealing to a very particular subculture. Still, his long career points to a market for these messages, and his invocations of the 2016 election point to the way that political unease can offer a marketing oppor…
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