Religion Dispatches
…nn Beck for his “caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left,” charging that he “brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.” Kristol is this close to Roger Ailes and the heart of Fox News, so if Kristol is criticizing Beck, then that means that the sharks, instead of being jumped over by Beck, are in the…
Read More…nd refused the priest’s urging her to have an abortion, he sent her to the Philippines to deliver, where she nearly died. When Rita came back to LA, penniless and with an infant daughter, she told her story to Bishop John Ward. He didn’t get back to her for four months, then told her that the priest she suspected was the father was merely a guest in the LA Archdiocese and not under his jurisdiction. When I called Ward he said to me: “I referred he…
Read More
…cribbage in the trenches, and the exotic surprises that Australia and the Philippines held for an Oregon farmboy. Of course, there was a good deal more to his war, but he didn’t care to talk about that. He was a proud veteran who would be buried in a Veteran’s Cemetery not far from the towns where he lived most of his life, but he was also a profoundly modest man. If he thought he belonged to the “greatest generation,” he never showed it. So it w…
Read More
…the process their discriminatory work permits. These “guest” workers, who today number between 250,000 and 400,000 (half of whom are illegal) did not only toil. They fell in love and established families and had children, probably more than 2,000 children, who were sent to state-run schools like Tel Aviv’s Bialik-Rogozin to learn with young Israelis their age to read, to write and to add and subtract—in Hebrew. They also were taught about the mir…
Read More
…the Almighty. The family patriarch was on a mission trip preaching in the Philippines and prayed to God “for a Timothy,” another preacher to assist him in the work. The pregnancy was difficult and nearly ended many times, but God “spared” the child, just as he has spared him on the field of athletic battle. At the end of the piece, the couple return to their fundamental commitment of faith: their acceptance of God’s often mysterious ways. Since t…
Read More
…en used to target activists and journalists in Russia. The bill’s sponsors promote it as a measure to “protect children from harmful information.” Member of Parliament Aldan Smayil said the legislation’s intent was ““to protect children from information that kills the feeling of warmth and humanity, which is harmful to the health and psyche, promotes violence and is, in short, spiritually devastating to the younger generation.” Finland: Marriage E…
Read More
…ess in use in the late nineteenth century (at least, outside Germany) than today, evoking a King James Bible-like tone. Second is the searing, ominous music by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood’s score is brilliant, borrowing much from contemporary avant-garde/classical groups like the Kronos Quartet (who use all classical instruments in imaginative new ways) and Alloy Orchestra (a contemporary group using any and everything possible to recre…
Read More…councils and 1.7 million members throughout the United States, Canada, the Philippines, Mexico, Poland, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, Guatemala, Guam and Spain. In a press release about the $1 million donation, spokesperson Patrick Korten stated: “From the day we were founded 126 years ago, strengthening and protecting the family has always been central to the mission of the Knights of Columbus. Pres…
Read More
…South Africa in Africa; and, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines in Asia. Each study in the project addresses the extent to which evangelicalism, a religious movement based on biblical orthodoxy, has helped or hindered the inauguration and consolidation of the democratic movement in the global South. This newest volume, on Africa, is edited by Oxford emeritus Terence O. Ranger, and it complements the great work being done by…
Read More…en for sodomy) and in nations where equality is gaining traction, like the Philippines (whose government is debating the specifics of an anti-discrimination bill). “You have to work in the places that are most unsafe,” she said. “But you also have to push the bar higher, because pushing the bar higher benefits all of us.” Media Matters reviews the anti-LGBT credentials of several legal scholars promoting “religious liberty” laws that would allow o…
Read More