Religion Dispatches
…religious diversity in America is a messy, complicated, and confusing social reality not limited to one theological vision of a Father in Heaven, or a Creator of the Universe, or a Lord who is the Supreme Ruler. God can be found in sex, drugs, and rock and roll; God is love, peace, and war; God lives in anything, everything, and nothing at all; God evolves, is eternal, and is an illusion….
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…, or join the protests every Friday in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem. Diaspora Jews can boycott the settlements, which does indeed serve a function for liberal American Jews, just not the one Beinart imagines. Second, when Beinart speaks of intermarriage he speaks as if he’s from his grandmother’s generation. Intermarriage is a reality American Jews will have to deal with. It’s not going away nor, I would argue, should i…
Read More…fe was not sliced off into religion and not-religion so very clearly and abruptly. We didn’t have to change in the phone booth, as it were, into the non-religious as we transitioned abruptly from ritual to rat race. It was not so very problematic for one to bleed over into the other. And during Ramadan, we grew up to expect lighter workloads. Migrant workers in certain Gulf countries learned to expect total lack of productivity and sometimes a com…
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…dern holiday, the Roman festival of the Lupercalia, held on the Ides of February (February 13-15). Recall Shakespeare once again: it was during the Lupercalia, he imagined, that Julius Caesar [TK] it three times. Just one month later, during the Ides of March, he lost his life in a bloody hail of daggers. Loving is linked to dying. While we know little about it, the Lupercalia seems to have been a curious Latin festival with mysterious Greek origi…
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…me Wagon rep” who becomes the “mullah of Salem.” The Pequot War was a “destructive tantrum” inspired by the same frustration that makes “skateboarders…break their own skateboards in half.” Into this Marvel Comics colony Vowell inserts a host of analogies bent on making Puritan obscurity present. John Cotton’s Southampton sendoff in 1630 is “like scoring Nelson Mandela to deliver the commencement address at the neighbor kid’s eighth-grade graduatio…
Read More…linton over the Monica Lewinsky perjury scandal.” In a recent edition of Jerusalem Report, Mike Evans, the head of the Jerusalem Prayer Team, wrote: “The question in the minds of many elderly Jews in Israel is: Will Barack Obama’s newly-appointed Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, continue his efforts to divide Jerusalem and turn Judea and Samaria over to the PLO?” ++++++++++ Busy Days for ‘eBay of Prophecy’ As if the crashing economy with its record…
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…llowed immediately, leading to the famous pronouncement of death on Salman Rushdie by the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Most of those protesting Salman Rushdie’s novel never read the novel itself or were familiar with the “Crane” issue in the classical Arabic commentaries on the Quran. It was enough that the sacrality of Muhammad and the Quran were “violated” by oblique and fictionalized reference in a novel, in the genre of narrativ…
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…After a searching review of the record and applicable case law,” the judge ruled, “we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.” He gave three reasons. First, unlike science, ID invokes supernatural explanations. Second, it rests on the flawed argument that evidence against the current theory of evolution supports the design alternative. Third, scientists have largely refuted t…
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…enter the EU. British newspapers reported that more witches were learning English and raised concerns that disgruntled witches would flee Romania and set up shop in western EU nations. Andrei Chiliman, mayor of the First District in the capital of Bucharest, called for taxing witches. He also demanded greater resources to prosecute witches with fraud. He remarked, “If money from witchcraft can buy the kind of houses they have, it means witches m…
Read More…n a Texas college town writes that one mother at the neighborhood pool instructed her children not to play with his Mormon kids. Another woman in Texas remembers that her LDS congregation was banned from participating in a community-wide Christmas event and that non-Church members once barged into Sunday meetings shouting that Mormons were cult members and devil worshippers. A man who grew up in upstate New York remembers being singled out as Morm…
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