Religion Dispatches
…, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim is less miraculous-seeming than that. Perhaps they are not suggesting that religiosity can effect the size of the human brain, but rather that there is an elective affinity between brain size, brain activity, and religiosity. If you’ve got a small brain then you’re more likely to be born again, and if you have…
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…n of church and state, writing:* This is a misleading argument repeatedly trumpeted by secularists who denounce biblical morality and truth. As you probably know this often repeated mantra appears no where in our founding documents or governing documents. However, let us be clear, no one, especially bible believing Christians are calling for a state church. We do not believe any Church should rule over the State or the State over any Church, they…
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…e of the term.” The redemptive power of ideas For the most part, Americans today consume public speaking through three avenues: politics, the classroom, and the pulpit. Of these three, a good TED talk resembles nothing so much as a sermon. “The speakers seem fevered, possessed, Pentecostal,” tech critic Virginia Heffernan wrote in the New York Times Magazine back in 2009. “A great TED talk is reminiscent of a tent revival sermon,” Megan Hustad wro…
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…ee that he or she anticipates the end atimes with eager anticipation. This world, the world of the here and now and the everyday, is a world given over—not necessarily to the Antichrist—but certainly to sin and corruption and matter. The apocalyptically-minded may breezily leave that world to the corporate raiders, the plutocrats, the polluters, the empires, the sexually suspect, the violent and abusive, and so on. Such wicked people may do all th…
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…und themselves in. I wanted to offer a story of God’s interaction with the world that spoke to the beauty and pain of our bodied lives in this world. But it needed to be a story that could help them see how vital our bodies and our differences are to a loving God, and how racism and sexism are two examples of how human falleness distorts the beautiful possibilities of our lives together. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Entertain them? Piss…
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…ose religious philosophy weaves Plato with the New Testament and shows a scrupulous concern with the material world, writes in Gravity and Grace, “The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything…the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.” Her idea is that something, anything—the Bible, the cross, the person slumpe…
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…job security, and to outsource once-stable, working class jobs around the world. As world-weary “New Agers” became cynical and dejected, turning away from politics to become entrepreneurs, libertarians and lifestyle gurus, a new “neo-liberal” world was emerging around them. In this world, a small cadre of entrepreneurs and corporate overlords (a teensy bit more multicultural and multi-gendered than before) win massively, pay close to no taxes, an…
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…and invites participation in a community defined by such love, we want the world to be ruled by a law of “tit-for-tat,” a law according to which love is earned by achievement, and being loved is a sign that one deserves it. And so we find God’s unconditional love to be an affront, and we respond with hostility. In the face of such hostility, how is God to establish a loving relationship with us? Browning’s answer is drawn from his own experience a…
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…ral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world’s history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised. The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto w…
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…new satanic army will also be rapidly destroyed, permitting a shiny new Jerusalem to descend from the clouds—a new Jerusalem from which Jesus will rule forever over a world where death is no more. Personally, I have always wondered why, if Jesus is destined to be victorious, he and God should put themselves to so much trouble first. It seems to me that by delaying the inevitable, they are actually colluding with the beast, the false prophet, and…
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