Religion Dispatches
…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
Read More
…nks. You have to determine that on your own.” Haggard’s weekly Oval Office phone calls and grip and grin NAE photo ops with former President George W. Bush are now mere vestiges of an old life, prior to what he calls the “crisis.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggar…
Read More
…ment of 50,000, as if the faithful at church. The devotion was audible, as tickets were distributed to friends of the Cuban government and not through a public sale. Here the religious nature of the Cuban sporting event is acknowledged only to be dismissed as inauthentic. The patriotic, quasi-religious crooning is suspicious because of its apparent production by the Cuban government, which distributed tickets to friends. Morosi recognizes religiou…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
Read More…bravery. The law that passed in June—which is, I think, best explained as cheap populist scapegoating—has served to activate and embolden widespread homophobia, which seems to me to have been previously often latent (the homophobia I encountered in Vladimir 10 years ago was none too aggressive). Phenomena like “Occupy Pedophilia” have appeared on the scene. Although it’s hard to say exactly how common anti-LGBT violence is in Russia, it should be…
Read More…th hate from politicians and religious leaders seeking political power and cheap popularity.” She and more than 130 volunteers then distributed the magazine across the country and into some unlikely hands, including to Uganda’s Parliament, president, and other politicians, as well as churches and media outlets. Nabagesera says Bombastic has been a “big hit,” allowing her to attract correspondents in every country across the African continent. She…
Read More
…armed against. War in the name of faith is a recurring theme, as with cell-phone videos of beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dichotomy is spread wide, with ISIS on one end and the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it i…
Read More…sday, to every registered Republican or non-aligned Iowa voter with a cell phone on record. . . . The video’s star is Molotov Mitchell, whom Cary K. Gordon, president of PeaceMakers Institute and pastor of Sioux City’s Cornerstone Church, calls “the guerilla warrior of Judeo-Christian political commentary.” Mitchell is an edgy independent filmmaker whose Illuminati Pictures delivers something akin to an animated political cartoon weekly at WorldN…
Read More
…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…
Read More
…ate, an ancient institution revived by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied th…
Read More