Religion Dispatches
…, or Sarah Palin (or hell, why not even recently disgraced former Representative Anthony Weiner?) to volunteer as an experimental subject to test the long-term spiritual effects of magic mushrooms….
Read More…ed liberal democracy. That debate is now coming to an end. In its place, new questions are being posed. What does all this mean? What trajectory and direction will politics take in the Muslim world? What role will Islam play in Egyptian politics? The fact is that no one knows and this is an entirely unprecedented situation. It is entirely possible that this may well be a different type of Islamic Revolution and we must take that possibility seri…
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…you face. So, I hope the history of my book, which is really the first two-thirds of the book, will inform. The arguments are meant to piss off some and excite others. As for pleasure, I hate dull writing and try to make it lively. I hope I succeeded. What alternate title would you give the book? The title is perfect. I would not change it for all the tea in China. How do you feel about the cover? Hate it. I wanted a picture of JFK with nuns in f…
Read More…bia is a part of a much larger conservative movement. There have been many high-profile examples of evangelical yogaphobia (I have written about some of them here and here), but evangelicals are not the only players in the yogaphobic movement. Fr. Colhoun’s comments concerning yoga were not dissimilar from other yogaphobic remarks from contemporary high-profile Catholics whose positions have ranged from identifying yoga as self-destructive activit…
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…the moon into blood,” the prophet Joel explains. The book of Acts, in the New Testament, restates the point, and in Revelation the moon becomes “as red as blood.” Blood, warfare, and Nostradamus-style speculation make for good entertainment, and Hagee’s book reportedly had a print run of 750,000. For the film, he enlisted award-winning filmmaker Keith Miller as director. Producer Rick Eldridge told RD that “three private entities” had funded the…
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…least part of the reason why the Muslim world, as opposed to certain Muslim-minority communities, suffers from a slide in technology, science, and even in learning its own tradition—if the Taliban are the students, we shudder to think who their teachers were—is because of political and social circumstances. We have little if any awareness of how regularly Muslim societies have been on the receiving end of violence, and I do not mean in the Middle…
Read More…tholic, local Catholic churches were noted. Yet video clips honoring “right-to-life” leaders were mostly the religious right types: Mike Huckabee, and of course Sarah Palin. Catholics and religious right leaders have long made common cause on abortion but the cultural differences between the two groups is strongly discernible. Heroic Media uses television, websites and billboards to promote alternatives to abortion. Compared to much of the pro-l…
Read More…blues-inflected, sparse, roots-based songwriting, are framed as naïve, salt-of-the-earth country folk easily abused by unscrupulous person, always victims and never perpetrators. Season 2 both sustains and complicates this narrative, as balladeer Gunnar commits “Nashville”’s cardinal sin—passing off his brother’s outlaw country songs as his own, thus projecting a false artistic and personal image. The wages of inauthenticity are steep; he is punis…
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…eve it is morally proper to provide access to all the medical services: pre- and post-natal care, adoption referral, abortion care, contraception and the like. Next are the clergy whose “official” religious teachings oppose contraception and abortion, but nevertheless will quietly and privately support and reassure the woman, even referring her to an abortion provider she can trust. All of these clergy recognize the morality of this “common ground…
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…g as its prophets. History shows that reason may alter the posture of faith-based communities, may force them to shift their language and limit their size and their socio-political reach, but it will not destroy faith. The very definition of faith should make this apparent. Atheists miscalculate the core significance of theism if they assume it is about doctrine and creeds, ritual forms and physical structures; those things most often attacked. Th…
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