Religion Dispatches
…tform, and responding with their own message of hope: “Like in many small, rural communities, teenagers in the area often struggle with nothing to do, with drinking, and so on,” said Broad of the likely culprits. “Some of the tagging was truly malicious,” he added. “The doors of the Roman Catholic church down the road were sprayed with ‘Satan’s House.’ Still, we wanted to respond as someone who cares, as someone who listens, even when the forum fo…
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…gleaned from his recent praise of “silence” in the midst of the ceaseless rush of digital information, as expressed in his World Communications Day speech of 2012: “In our time, the Internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers—indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions,…
Read More…le to contact the prime minister’s office an urge them not to allow the disruption of the event. Peru: Civil Union bill gets debate Hundreds of Peruvians rallied on Monday night on the eve of legislative debate on a same-sex civil unions bill; activists released a video pushing for a public debate on the measure. As we have reported, American evangelical activist Mat Staver has traveled to Peru to urge lawmakers to resist calls for civil union leg…
Read More…re to the point, is it a story? (Imagine the newsroom pitch: Here’s a hot one–religious leaders and theologians jawing about love of God and love of neighbor.) And yet, this is religion at work in the world–slow-moving, oblique and seemingly, frustratingly, out of step, off-tune and irrelevant to contemporary standards of newsworthiness. And yet the potential for a truly big story….
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…heir premonition bear out. Incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock won Georgia’s run-off, but Walker gleaned 48.6 percent of the vote, most of it from rural areas dominated by White evangelical Protestants. The worst offenders are liberal And NPR isn’t alone. The Times ran this howler: “‘Saved by Grace’: Evangelicals Find a Way Forward With Herschel Walker.” That’s pure comedy gold to anyone who grew up in an ultra-conservative religious tradition but l…
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…civic mentoring. Simply put, their work did not jibe with the traditional news media values of conflict, currency, and power. These were regular people doing everyday work in the hope of effecting incremental change. Their stories went unreported for the same reasons that much of the right’s small-bore organizing went unremarked in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s: reporting on evolutionary social change is tougher than writing up this week’s conflict,…
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…ple, two squad cars had responded, as is protocol (not four as reported in news stories), and there was nothing about the rock thrown through the door window being 45 pounds. In addition, the police report doesn’t mention home security lights being “yanked down,” nor is there mention of children, children’s toys, “or anything on children at all.” This includes the alleged tricycle that, Mason claimed, should have signaled the presence of kids to t…
Read More…while Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem took a cynical glee in the symbolic destruction of middle America. All of these stories fit into previously established subgenres well-suited to apocalyptic themes, but Cloverfield is the first to venture into the most apocalyptic of them all: the giant monster genre. Cloverfield owes much to Japanese giant monster films, or kaiju eiga. The monsters of these films are wrathful gods, either figuratively or literal…
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…ransposed his rise to political fame and his political message into sacred stories about hope and change (“we can believe in”) and the fulfillment of America’s destiny. Recall artist Shepard Fairey’s iconic image of a beatific Barack, will.i.am’s myth-creating Yes We Can video, or the numerous discussions as to whether Obama’s candidacy and election were the “Promised Land” referred to by Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop…
Read More…, but I can’t help seeing this as bad news for the Republicans in the long run. It’s true that unions are considerably smaller than the evangelical population—about 11% of working Americans, compared to roughly 20-25% of the population that is evangelical—but as we know, religious practice is on the decline in the US*, and boy, it sure looks like organized labor has been mightily energized by the events of the past couple of weeks. What’s more, th…
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