Religion Dispatches
…ists. From the Ten Commandments, to the ten avatars of Vishnu (Krishna was number eight), to Buddhism’s ten precepts, religions are all about systems, ethical prescriptions—or proscriptions—and grand schemes. Order out of chaos is the name of the game. All this to suggest that the Top Ten list is obviously something deeply ingrained in the human experience. So here, without further preamble, RD’s picks for the Ten Best of 2008’s Religion Top Ten l…
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…o, like those men of old, know what to do.” DeMoss has collaborated with a number of her fellow speakers before. In 2002, she edited a compilation of essays on submission and headship entitled Biblical Womanhood in the Home, which drew contributions from Kassian, Hunt, and other complementarian matriarchs, such as Dorothy Kelley Patterson, who with her husband, Paige Patterson, created the homemaking degree and curriculum introduced at Southwester…
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…mption”); Redemption is the name of a heavy metal band, and the title of a number of record albums including one by the metal group Vomitory, and the hip hop duo GRITS; “Redemption” was the title of a two-part episode on television’s “Stargate SG-1,” and also of a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” two-parter. “Redemption Song” was one of many of Bob Marley’s extraordinary musical contributions, and if you haven’t seen The Shawshank Redemption, rent…
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…ew thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy critique I’d developed of Deepak…
Read More…clear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings,” he was quoted as saying. “Let’s think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation. … God has placed man and woman and the summit of creation and has entrusted them with the earth. The design of the Creator is written in nature.” Kaoma accuses Francis of playing “hi…
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…ry of brutal union suppression by employers who figured out that it’s much cheaper to take the penalties currently handed out for labor law violations (which are extremely weak and rarely delivered) than to allow workers to unionize without interference in free and fair representation elections. By the Numbers The cold, hard facts are these: Polls consistently report that 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearl…
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…le from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popu…
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…n part by denouncing her as a bigot and a racist who wanted “to reduce the number of children [born] to the nation’s poorest economic groups, which tend to be persons of color and other minorities.” The Pro-Life Action League made a similar criticism this week against the Guttmacher Institute, claiming that the Institute’s call for publicly-funded birth control “takes aim at the poor by recommending more government spending on programs to reduce t…
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…n Mick Rock, Blood and Glitter (London, UK: Vision On Publishing, 2001), unnumbered page. [2] Marc Spitz, Bowie: A Biography (New York: Crown, 2009), p. 214. [3] Quoted in Mick Rock, Blood and Glitter (London, UK: Vision On Publishing, 2001), unnumbered page. [4] Ellen Degeneres: Search YouTube. As of this writing, an excerpt from the episode in question could be found here. “Totally credible plastic rock star”: Quoted in the booklet accompanying…
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…back against that corruption, the deep state and all the rest.” Given any number of other statements by Johnson, this comment may seem unremarkable. But the transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of…
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