Religion Dispatches
…soul) damned.” To be lost is not merely a geographic problem for marooned airline passengers, or for men unwilling to stop and ask for directions—it’s a spiritual and moral condition. These days a google search turns up over 500,000,000 hits (that’s half a billion); not too surprising for a basic and often-used term. Similar numerical results come from google searches on terms like “run” and “hide.” Meanwhile, “found” yields over 1.3 trillion hit…
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…icipation in the City Council of Glen Cove at the time of the 1990 Avianca airline crash in the nearby Long Island town of Cove Neck—a flight from Columbia to New York that ran out of fuel as it was held circling JFK airport awaiting permission to land, killing 73. In the midst of a subsequent council meeting, the mayor of Glen Cove sequentially cited the heroics of local emergency workers for responding to the crash, and then lamented the presenc…
Read More…h ultra-Orthodox men interfering in your travel, you can just take another airline. If only it were as easy for female employees affected by the numerous lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement to find a better job. *Correction: This post originally indicated that gender separation was due to concerns about women’s menstrual cycles. To read more about gender separation among Haredi Jews in Israel and in the U….
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…ginning of a journey that will have them owning a Christian theme park, an airline, a series of television stations; they will be the first to colonize another planet. Each new revelation is greeted with enthusiastic shouts and frenzied applause. Throughout it all, Jacobs’ camera captures, with stark verité detachment, the trials of the small community making the film, and dwells on the character of its leader. Who is Pastor Richard Gazowsky? Is h…
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…n the workers all around us. Unfortunately, many aren’t doing well. Record numbers are employed in jobs offering no health insurance, pension, vacation days or sick days. Millions of workers are having billions of dollars in unpaid wages stolen illegally by unethical employers. Millions are misclassified as independent contractors when they really should be employees. Some workers have their tips stolen. Although we should all attempt to support e…
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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…
Read More…illac” insurance plans that will be taxed under this new law—and “it ain’t cheap!” she proclaimed. As a good Republican, she believes in the self-regulating power of an unencumbered free market. If insurance companies are allowed to compete freely with one another, she figures, then insurance premiums will go down and people will have more choice. She noted that about 10 companies compete for her health care dollar each year when they have open en…
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…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…
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…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…
Read More…hey don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Ameri…
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