Religion Dispatches
…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…
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…sle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol,…
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…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…
Read More…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…
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…then it has to begin by tackling the question of land. Swampy, virgin, and cheap Canadians who tell stories about land in a public setting can no longer do so while ignoring that they (we) are treaty people—that Canadians live in nation-to-nation relations with Indigenous peoples. As treaty people, part of the responsibility of settlers is to know and tell stories that acknowledge Indigenous land is the very same territory that they also call home…
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…have been kept down at the very bottom in order for the American System of cheap labor to function. Although Henry Clay opposed slavery in theory, the need for this ongoing subjugation was most certainly in the mind of The Great Compromiser who coined the term “American System” during the expansionist years of ‘Indian removal’ and a related Second Middle Passage that took over one million people in shackles from the Chesapeake to the rich bottomla…
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…ry process of truth-telling and the material righting of wrongs. Rather, a cheap reconciliation was rendered, which served—at the beginning of Jim Crow, no less—to hide our continued animosities from ourselves, rejecting one of the major opportunities this nation has had to face what Eddie Glaude, following James Baldwin, calls “the lie.” It is now relatively well-known that most Confederate monuments were constructed at the height of lynching and…
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…naming her a “Hero of the Tenderloin” in her district office just south of Denver, Colorado, where she and I sat down to discuss the future of LGBTQ equality in the United Methodist Church on Friday. (Watch the full interview in the Facebook Live video below.) Although she had encountered broadly welcoming UMC communities throughout her career, Oliveto was admittedly nervous when she began to hear the call to episcopacy. “I didn’t want to be harme…
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…ding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints, an ELCA mission church in Denver, Colorado. In the book, she likens herself to “a Lutheran Nikita,” the fictional teenaged drug addict whose death was faked by the government so she could do their dirty work. “I was allowed not to die in exchange for working for God,” Bolz-Weber writes, “I’d have to become God’s bitch.” I had a chance to talk with Bolz-Weber about her journey and how she now finds i…
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…hristian [Right]” school board victories—a favorite tactic of the Right—in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Dallas, and calls on believers to “find anyone in church that’s not registered to vote, register them to vote and get them to vote their biblical values,” claiming that church mobilizations, and efforts by groups like Moms for Liberty, were key to these local victories. Pastor Jentezen Franklin, Senior Pastor at Free Chapel, based in Georgia, e…
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