Religion Dispatches
…Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes worked doing faith outreach on a number of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008 but not in 2010. In both the RNS interview and in an article on Huffington Post, Sapp argues for a causal link between lackluster faith outreach in this election cycle and Democratic losses; his conclusion: “the results were disastrous.” To support this argument, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally…
Read More
…ism; crime and chaos versus law. This name is not legion, but loser Like a number of his fellow speakers, Posobiec fixated on what he perceives as male virility, framing Joe Biden as the physical embodiment of the decay and decadence of failing liberalism: Liberalism itself is Joe Biden, a senile, selfish remnant of a failed world order which destroyed Western economies through invaders, sacrificed Western blood to its most freakish contents, and…
Read More
…hment from God for Satanism—the same episode that Chrissy Stroop ranked as number one on her own top 10 list, and a worthy contender, no doubt! But since Robertson liked to say outrageous things like this on a regular basis, I created a list more attuned to underlying structural aspects of his resume: less about preposterous provocations and more about his work as a cog in the everyday banality of evil in the Republican coalition. It’s interesting…
Read More
…ery notions of God and God’s world as the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire’s Candide: or Optimism presents its reader with a merciless, satirical attack on German philosopher Leibniz’s notion that this world is the best possible world that God could have created, given that God is, after all, both benevolent and all powerful. The central figure Candide, a naïf of the first order, challenges theodicy with the ironclad logic of a child as he pr…
Read More
…of state crimes to do if the state that inflicted violence on them won’t fairly adjudicate the case and if they cannot then go to the ICC? Moreover, although I respect Secretary Blinken a great deal, I am not at all satisfied with his answer. For example, West Bank Palestinians suffering violence by the Israeli state, or its citizens, cannot get justice from the Israeli system, which he said they could. This is widely documented. If our position…
Read More
…prevailed. Doug Jones eked out a narrow victory, and Judge Roy Moore lost fair and square. But he didn’t concede. Moore’s short non-concession speech late Tuesday night was comprised almost entirely of a paraphase of Psalm 40. He attempted to prop up the sad and subdued crowd by saying: But we also know that God is always in control. You know, part of the thing—part of the problem with this campaign is we’ve been painted in an unfavorable and unfa…
Read More
…es as victims, they take every criticism as further proof that they are unfairly singled out for the world’s harsh judgment. So in order to even approach a solution to the crisis in Israel/Palestine, it’s necessary to ask: Where did this self-image come from? The whole Zionist project to create a Jewish state began not merely because Jews felt victimized, but because so many felt powerless to do anything about it as long as they lived among the go…
Read More
…the Grateful Dead collectively formed an intentionally itinerant community numbering in the tens of thousands, with their own customs, vernacular, art, and economy. In his explanation of the lure of the Grateful Dead to thousands of Deadheads around the country, Garcia ruminated, “maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” Indeed, the promise of a great American adventure animated Deadheads to undertake an annual pilgrimage across th…
Read More
…of innovative thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality, who could marry a number of different lenses to create something new. It’s not a strictly academic work by any means; it’s meant to be accessible to people with all sorts of (and no) Jewish backgrounds—hence the glossary in the back. But yeah, there are footnotes. For someone not well-versed in Jewish feminist theory, how transgressive or radical are these essays? Some of them push the envel…
Read More
…different from normal humans. There are people who identify with angels, fairies, wolves, etc. By the end of my research I became convinced that this is a sizable community worthy of serious study. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? By studying vampires, we study ourselves. I am concerned that despite the best intention of many scholars, the term “new religious movement” (a label that has been applied to vampires) carries wi…
Read More