Religion Dispatches
…Muslim youth from Britain, the US, and other Western countries, like the cruel executioner who appears in the YouTube videos of the beheadings of foreign journalists and aid workers who, according to some authorities is believed to be a 23-year old former rapper from West London. The young men who are lured to ISIS join for a variety of motives. Perhaps the strongest is the desire to be involved in a great war, a cosmic struggle that allows them…
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…ake on decisional roles that appeared to be exclusively meant for the male world. So the areas of reflection are extended throughout the different cultures, they transform and present themselves with different accents, sometimes becoming entwined with political and strongly ideological movements. In this globalised and strongly dialectical horizon, there is an urgent need to find answers. Our Plenary is engaged in discovering and understanding the…
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…g Campaign Because Everything Is Terrible.” Seventeen magazine’s coverage demanded, “Is Anything Sacred?!” Sacred indeed. Whatever else the Charlie Charlie phenomenon is, it demonstrates a longing to step outside a disenchanted world where the logic of the market rules and our hopes and dreams amount to market demographics. A terrifying demonic encounter at least would confirm that there is something real beyond a world dominated by media and simu…
Read More…expansion of U.S. power aligned with the rise of Billy Graham (his famous New York City crusade was in 1957), the founding of Campus Crusade of Christ (1951), and other evangelical groups aiming to fulfill the Great Commission. Elliot’s story emerged at the center of the wave of these movements. As global capitalism began to make middle-class life more and more comfortable, something was needed shake people out of their settled religious ways. Hu…
Read More…gress. “From a moral and ethical point of view, the way this was done with videos that were recorded surreptitiously and the twisting of the truth to manipulate dumb politicians to do something that couldn’t be done otherwise, is fundamentally wrong,” he said. The faith leaders also rejected the idea that there is something antithetical about religious people supporting fetal tissue donation for scientific research (which Americans overwhelmingly…
Read More…on movement. Fiorina’s claim that the secretly recorded Planned Parenthood videos contain an image of a “fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain” is not quite accurate, according to the Washington Post, although in one video, a technician “described witnessing a scene similar to Fiorina’s description.” But no matter—Fiorina’s full-throated condemnation of…
Read More…has the specter of religiously-based oppression taken on such a heightened profile, with the potential for such devastating results. I believe it is a true emergency for which strong and constructive countermeasures are necessary. …
Read More…ur children against us. As folklorist Timothy Evans pointed out in The New York Times, stories of adolescents driven mad by Ouija boards, Dungeons & Dragons, and other deviant media are themselves a form of folklore. Ironically, our horror and fascination over these crimes makes Slender Man even more fascinating and fuels the legend complex further. Somewhat like the Greek myth of Cronus, Americans have a deep-seated fear that their children will…
Read More…s the co-author of Crow After Roe: How “Separate But Equal” Has Become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We Can Change That. In addition to writing about the activities of anti-abortion groups in legislatures, clinic escort and abortion rights activist Katie Klabusich chronicles in real-time the tactics used outside of facilities that anti-abortion activists often refer to as “sidewalk counseling.” Producing videos and live-tweeting their…
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…adox led me to think that what we’re asking of DNA is more than just the “truth” of it (and truth in quotes because there are lots of things that are provisional about the technology). What does DNA add? I think it can add a deeper sense of history. If you’re doing genetic ancestry testing—bracketing for a moment the veracity of the test—what these inferences provide can often be long histories. For people that have no information at all, some Afr…
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