Religion Dispatches
…ontinuum of the book’s readership. What alternate title would you give the book? Well, I gave the book several horrendously self-important and nearly unreadable titles (which I hope will be lost to history or memory and which self-mortification prevents me from repeating here) before landing on Then Sings My Soul, an apt and effective choice, at least to my mind. And by and large I’m still pretty happy with it, for reasons I explain in the introdu…
Read More…ged over the Catholic vote between now and the November election. In their book The Catholic Vote: A Guide for the Perplexed (Orbis Books, 2008), Clarke E. Cochran and David Carroll Cochran, both political scientists, pointed out that divisions within the Catholic community has made it more difficult for Catholic voters to discern among candidates: “Levels of misunderstanding and acrimony between Catholics and Protestants have greatly diminished,…
Read More…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…
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…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…
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…y, Father Padrini, explained in a recent interview, toting around a prayer book on your phone is not that far removed from the actual books and rosaries that a devout Catholic would have once been expected carry. In this way, he said, “[t]he media can become places of reflection, also of silence… and surely they can contribute to a new socialization.” Socialization is the key to the success of the iPhone, which itself has inspired a level of devot…
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…aring the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that…
Read More…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…
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…th Florida Religious Studies Professor Julie Ingersoll literally wrote the book on Christian Reconstructionism and its wider influence, a topic she’s covered extensively for RD. Asked to explain how economic libertarianism gels with authoritarian Christianity, Ingersoll told RD, “These perspectives are compatible because, for far right-wing Christians, a society organized according to biblical law will leave patriarchal families operating unfetter…
Read More…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
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…ion by joining other denominations or leaving Christianity altogether. The number of priests and nuns was at an all-time low even before the recent sexual scandals, and the number of self-identified Catholics world-wide keeps declining. Many of those who remain in the Church ignore standard doctrines and believe what they want. How many Catholics disobey Church rules? About as many as the angels dancing on a pinhead. Believers know that Jesus prom…
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