Religion Dispatches
…on should be scrapped in favor of a system he calls “Godism”—with him in charge. The man crowned “King of Peace” by congressmen once said, according to sermons reprinted in his church’s Unification News: “Suppose I were to hit you with the baseball bat to stop you, bloodying your ear and breaking a bone or two, yet still you insisted on doing more work for Father.”…
Read More…process, rather than the substance, Republicans will make it more about Jerusalem, and, as Mitt Romney absurdly accused in his acceptance speech last week, that President Obama has “thrown Israel under the bus.” But, as Daniel Seidemann noted at The Daily Beast before the chaos late this afternoon: The [Democrats’] 2008 platform stated: “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel. The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for fin…
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…e with the very same fat cats Warren denounces; that lurches to proclaim Jerusalem the one and only capital of Israel even when it knows how catastrophically wrongheaded this is to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East; that is quite obviously afraid to talk candidly about grinding poverty in America for fear of shattering the illusion that we’re all just middle-class folks about to recover fully from a GOP-induced hangover; and one th…
Read More…us/spiritual. Now it has also taken on more secularized forms for sports, drug rehabilitation, weight loss, or even marketing. We retreat from—or move away from—the everyday, ordinary to get a mega-dose of something. In the spiritual retreat we get a mega-dose of sacred remembrance or dhikr. Sometime during the last ten days of Ramadan, the men will go into the mosque—away from family and work—and become more conscientious about prayer and worship…
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…church. You are not my kind of Mormon.” You know, giving interviews—that’s breaking some unspoken Mormon cultural rules: like speaking outside the official chain of command, and only saying positive things about Mormonism in public, even if it skirts a complicated truth. I felt like I never exaggerated and told it like it was. Once Mitt called me and demanded, “Why does the press always go to you and not to women who admire me?” I told him, “I al…
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…I’m not underestimating the difficulties but I really am calling for more trust in the Holy Spirit. Which to me doesn’t mean avoiding responsibility but instead means exercising great care about the change we need—balancing courage with humility, and boldness with gentleness—all fruits of the Spirit. Most essential is making sure we use just means toward just ends, not bullying or demonizing anyone. It should be possible, it must be possible, to e…
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…ge its existence, much less provide support), spoke out against draconian drug laws that disproportionately effected the poor, and was a supporter of free speech, particularly when it came to artists, with whom he clearly felt an affinity. RD contributing editor Peter Laarman, who effectively succeeded Moody and served as senior minister of Judson from 1994 to 2004, writes: Howard had an electric and electrifying personal presence; I think of it a…
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…to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the Birmingham jail, Romney was tormenting boys with long hair at Cranbrook, and his Church was still 15 years away from lifting its ban on black men serving in the priesthood. Romney was still nearly half a ce…
Read More…d the contentious subject of American racism would likely bring unwanted scrutiny to the candidate who could become the first white man to unseat the nation’s first black president. The remarks earlier this year by now-former BYU professor, Randy Bott, that African Americans had been banned from the priesthood because they weren’t yet ready for it, brought unsolicited attention to the LDS faith’s racist past, causing a swift reaction from Church…
Read More…d amens.) It’s that opposition to change, the fundamental inability (or refusal) to conceive of a world that is meaningfully different than the one we presently exist in, that marks the Tea Party theology, notwithstanding all the far-right religious “celebrities” Beck put on stage over the weekend. Ignore all the bouncing balls, what you need to know about the Tea Party faith is that it’s in an unchanging, overwhelmingly powerful God. It’s also in…
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