Religion Dispatches
…tualized—New Agers with crystals, meditation retreats for the professional class. Instead, both old and new media have lit up the religious landscape, illuminating what is still an unconventional, and nebulous, but certainly increasingly capacious, understanding of the sacred in everyday life. Rock and roll can be religious, according to The Hold Steady; a recent Los Angeles Times article explores how celebrity doctors blur the lines between faith…
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…ittle bit heretical. By breaking from the stance of complete opposition to American hegemony, Sontag had betrayed a loyalty that was foundational for her comrades. One of the more revealing sentences of Hitch-22 appears as Hitchens describes his growing alienation from the Left as a supporter of the US invasion of Iraq. He borrows a line from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, in which West’s guide and lover C…
Read More…y, the Marxist-influenced school of thought developed by Central and South American theologians, and waged an aggressive media campaign in support of the Reagan administration’s policies in Nicaragua, El Salvador and elsewhere, alleging links between liberal church leaders and Marxist guerillas. After the Cold War, Naughton continues: The IRD turned its attention from the mainline churches’ activities in Central America to the churches’ internal a…
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…d members are rewriting it to fit their ideal of the future, and using the classroom to further that ideology. For instance, McLeroy said the board has added many Hispanic names to the curriculum, but it also downplays the struggles that countless Americans have made against oppression. McLeroy said his goals have always been: Students should learn about “divine providence” and “In God We Trust”; children should understand the Constitution; they m…
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…they do in order to survive. Because of this insight, the Doctor is not a classic vampire slayer, so much as an ecologist. He stops the Saturnynians for the same reason that environmentalists in North America combat the snakehead fish. Finally, it is fitting that Calvierri offers an alliance with the Doctor. Like the vampire, the Doctor is also an immortal outsider walking among us. He too has unnatural abilities and is alluring to the opposite s…
Read More…ilitary commander who identifies himself as “Father Octavian—Bishop Second Class, 20 clerics at my command.” Clearly there is some interesting church history in the thirty centuries between that future and our present, but the episode doesn’t explore it, beyond a throwaway line to the effect that “it’s the 51st century—the church has moved on.” Of course, Father Octavian isn’t what’s exciting about this episode. It’s the return of the Weeping Ange…
Read More…’s strongest growth in the United States is in Latino communities. The old American saying that “Sunday is the most segregated time of the week” holds largely true for Mormonism too. Even though Mormon congregations are organized geographically, Spanish-speaking members and English-speaking members living in the same communities often attend different services. Still, many of the conservative Anglo-Mormons I know here in Southern California work a…
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…easingly irrelevant. Surveys consistently show that younger generations of Americans are becoming more accepting of LGBTQ persons, and none other than former first lady Laura Bush admitted recently that same-sex marriage “will come.” It is also important to remember that the ELCA is not a denomination on the far-left fringes of American Protestantism; it is a traditionally moderate, left-of-center body whose historic heartlands are the Mid-Atlanti…
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…f him. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always do his homework. Unlike many Latin American Liberationists, black theologians, including Cone, actually tend to reject Marxism as a philosophical source. It is too white, too Western and, tends to include only economic class, not race, in its power analysis. Cone’s theological sources are the bible and black experience. If one is going to argue against his theology, one must argue against these sources not M…
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…power on the worldwide stage, Qur’an-burning would be an assertion of that American power. Second, in a world where different religious texts are read and discussed more broadly than ever before, Qur’an burning would be an unequivocal statement that Christian canon was the only canon that mattered. Third, in a world where right-wing extremists frequently ignore their majority status and claim that they are a persecuted minority, Jones eagerly empl…
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