Religion Dispatches
…ast to his namesake at the beginning of the series as he is the man of science. Eventually he seems to change his stance. Hume also becomes Odysseus, who chases, especially in his sailboat, his love Penelope (“Penny”). Desmond is the heroic traveler here, not just of space, but of time as well. Ultimately, the characters of Lost do not neatly stack up to their namesakes. Instead, the show takes and shakes: takes the various myths, and shakes them…
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…that seat I knew I would soon be airborne, soaring like a bird on performance-enhancing drugs. The sense of freedom and fun (and free food, even if airline food) was exhilarating. The airport has now become a place of horror. Do they have full-body scanners? I wonder as I’m herded into a long, bovine line. Abattoir or boudoir? Why is this bothering me so much? Don’t Touch Me There Even cursory reflection reveals my embodiment issues are buried de…
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…in the public square. But how realistic is that in America today? If a flight attendant had dismissed passengers with “salaam aleikum” rather than “have a blessed day,” we’d be having a very different discussion now—one most likely involving threats of Islamophobic violence and perhaps violence itself, as well as severe backlash against the airline. Christians, in other words, retain a highly privileged place in the American social hierarchy, and…
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…author’s life—some quite moving—that help to explain why he can’t countenance the existence of god. “Up Your Santa Claus Lane,” which describes Jillette’s response to his mother’s death, cannot fail to move. The devotion to family throughout puts to shame those who populate our headlines with the divine injunctions misguided parents cite to punish their children too severely. Penn may be an atheist, but he would not sacrifice his family, even for…
Read More…alized and discriminated against. This may be a matter of semantics, but since persecution is a potent rhetorical resource, and since it is also a central theme of the Christian tradition, Christian complaints about systematic marginalization tend to blend quite seamlessly into a broader narrative of persecution. As a practical matter, I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins. For Dreher, then, the explicit disavowal of the word “persecuti…
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…e who attend adult entertainment fairs aren’t exactly Lobért’s target audience. Her conspicuous appearance is also meant to attract the other women posing for photos and signing autographs, the women outside and in the casinos, the women working the Strip—the women she is trying to save. “The girls can relate to who we are and how we look in a way that they can’t with some of the typical frumpy Christians who come here,” Lobért told Sherwell. “We…
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…that I know. But there’s less and less religion on the Main Streets that concern us all. I have noted the paradoxical presence of religious language in our economic discourse before. Faith and trust, thrift and fidelity, company and community—this is the vaguely religious nomenclature that exists in some strange relation to the bodily and vitalist language of the Market to which I’ve alluded before. But as the crisis deepens, the language of psych…
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…ed only recently by former US President Jimmy Carter, when he voiced his concerns over the increasing merging of religion and state in the Bush administration and the element of fundamentalism in the White House. Carter sees that traits of religious fundamentalists are also applicable to neo-conservatives. There seems to be a major controversy between, on the one hand, so called hard-liners or conservatives and, on the other, the progressives. Is…
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…ion and peace among all people in our communities and in our nation.” “Reconciliation” is a concept that many Christians and Canadians find comforting; with its history in Christian rituals of absolution, this is not surprising. The term came to greater prominence in Canadian political discourse with the 2015 publication of the final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), focused on the church-state collaboration of “Indian…
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…have been kept down at the very bottom in order for the American System of cheap labor to function. Although Henry Clay opposed slavery in theory, the need for this ongoing subjugation was most certainly in the mind of The Great Compromiser who coined the term “American System” during the expansionist years of ‘Indian removal’ and a related Second Middle Passage that took over one million people in shackles from the Chesapeake to the rich bottomla…
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