Religion Dispatches
…e latest episode of my Bloggingheads program, I discuss, with The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman, the political obstacles facing the secularist movement in the United States: You can watch the entire discussion, which was prompted by this past weekend’s Reason Rally, here. Waldman wrote more about atheism in the United States in a column at TAP, and I wrote one on the prospects for a secularist political movement for the Guardian. Waldman obser…
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…ess, mysticism, creativity, meaning, purpose, identity, transcendence, and prophecy. In this regard, the members of the Grateful Dead are not prophetic in the sense that they are God’s anointed messengers on Earth; neither are they soothsayers who predict the future nor animated by any formal theological belief or conviction. However, they are prophetic in the way that the Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan imagines prophets in the his classic…
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…n-Espinoza and Rev. Traci Blackmon were outside Emancipation Park offering prayerful presence and witness when neo-Nazis, fascists, and unhooded Ku Klux Klan members descended on the intersection, unleashing violence that caused the security detail protecting Blackmon and Henderson-Espinoza to literally yank Rev. Blackmon off-camera during a live interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid. (Video from that segment can be found below.) Just a few hours later…
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…ecurity Service, amongst other security agencies, and only had a shoe to express his hatred of President Bush. The point is that this man was traumatized by the war. He wanted to express his anger. He had a shoe. He threw the shoe. Is this really so hard to understand? Do we as Americans treat having a shoe thrown at us as a sign of happiness or joy? We have become so conditioned to seeing Arabs and Muslims as the “Other” that we have to process s…
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…fastly oriented towards the divine feminine. An anti-clerical Christianity privileging not priests, but parishioners. Since 1938, the ecumenical Iona Community has held retreats in the restored Abby, dedicating themselves to the values Columba exemplified. West of Presbyterian Scotland, north of Methodist Wales, and east of Catholic Ireland, Iona was supposedly the womb for a different type of Christianity—an egalitarian, progressive, visionary fa…
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…ughts point toward the sorts of actions that Robertson seems to consider appropriate, the more disturbing they are; bordering on what ordinary people might perceive as treason. On most days I suspect that Robertson is engaged in a split consciousness at this point. Just as he may say that he doubts evolution (in one compartment of his brain) while accepting the science of vaccinations against evolving bacteria (in another compartment), likewise he…
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