Religion Dispatches
…nites who follow politics closely had been complaining for months of an unfair double standard. Obama was pilloried on every front page for his connection to a controversial clergyman, but McCain was getting off scot free for his link to an equally (or perhaps even more) controversial right-wing preacher, Rev. John Hagee, whose support he sought and whom he publicly thanked last year for his “spiritual guidance to politicians like me.” Finally, th…
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…e-sexed, of course. TBN’s Jan Crouch drew her stylistic cues from the big hair, big false eyelashes school of her old friend Tammy Faye Bakker, while Wendy’s hair mimics Jennifer Aniston’s. In a 2005 listing of emerging charismatic evangelical leaders under 40, Charisma’s editor, J. Lee Grady, who has been critical of the financial excesses and abuses of the Word of Faith movement, took a little dig at TBN when he wrote that the Alecs, “produce pr…
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…ate route to avoid the protests completely, closing with a ceremony at the airport before the Torch continued on its “Journey of Harmony.” Unhappy throngs quickly took over nearby restaurants and benches. “The Olympics is a world event. It’s not political,” said Chinese-American Ging Wang. “The people supporting Tibet were mostly Westerners,” said Carrie Zheng, a college student in her first year away from China. “The first thing is, Tibet is, was…
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…and right evangelicals on each of these issues. Importantly, more than 8 in 10 in the evangelical left/center want to find middle ground on abortion laws, while 6 in 10 in the evangelical right think there’s no room for compromise on abortion. On gay and lesbian issues, while only a quarter of the left/center evangelicals support allowing gays and lesbians to legally marry, a near majority (49 percent) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to e…
Read More…They’re parochial, in other words. But they also believe themselves to be fairly representing all perspectives when they are in fact not. They try to set themselves up as dispassionate umpires rising above the partisan fray in the spirit of Niebuhrian humility, when Niebuhr himself would tell them that they were just as prone to error as anyone else. Again, I’ll leave it up to my readers to decide if this is fair to the Villagers or not. I will sa…
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…just brains in vats is an indirect challenge to such sentiments. That same spirit of subversion has been behind a recent wave of books lambasting religion. Yet the ascent of thinkers like Dawkins, Dennett, and Sam Harris is just one more chapter in the history of science’s victory to becoming the ultimate arbiter of truth. For most of the past century, the humanities, and its penchant for complex theories privileging nurture over nature, directly…
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…eased or to attract the attention of deities who looked after them. Burial services mark one of the most sacred rites of passage: the “return” of a body and/or spirit to its “home” (perhaps this is why the idea of a “homeless ghost” is so disturbing). An ancient, unambiguous morality compels us to lay our loved ones to rest in proper, dignified fashion. Even the most pagan-phobic, sky-god-reviling atheist out there would think it unnatural to toss…
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…ly, a stunning view of Uganda’s largest mosque on a nearby hill. Only about 100 people had gathered by the appointed starting time of 2:00 p.m., but many more, the audience was told, would be coming from their earlier church services at their regular parishes. Far from the stage, but clearly in view, several vendors set up meat-roasting stands in anticipation of a crowd that might not fully embrace The Call’s advertised proclamation, “Prayer, fast…
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…hardy bunch, live here year round, braving temperatures that will climb to 130 degrees. It was 112 when I was there Saturday and Sunday. At the entrance to Slab City is Salvation Mountain, an adobe mountain covered in bright paint and topped with a white cross. Its creator is Leonard Knight, a desert prophet, an Elijah, who says God sent him here 30 years ago and commanded his Chevy dump truck to break down. While Knight was waiting to get his tr…
Read More…nd beauty of diversity. The phenomenon known as religion After teaching for 15 years in the southern part of the US, I have understood how important it was to explain the phenomenonological approach to religious studies. In brief, there is this phenomenon amongst humans and through out human history, known as “religion”. We look at this phenomenon as part of what it means to be human. Nothing more; nothing ominous; just like looking at different k…
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