Religion Dispatches
…rotted out by Democratic activists as a great supporter of what was then a new effort: a political action committee named for a Bible verse, specifically Matthew 25. You know, the the one about caring for the least of these? Because with the families of the slaughtered children at Newtown on hand, Pryor voted to protect his own hide, so his constituents who fall for NRA lies won’t drive him out of office. Just in case I’ve never made this clear be…
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…mobilized cannot all be dismissed as a motley crew of adventurers and ne’er-do-wells. From internet websites to literature and institutionalized instruction, sectarian identities and hatreds are actively fostered. Not all the converted will journey to war-zones in search of martyrdom. Most will be content to exercise their new-found contempt for “deviants” — particularly those closest to home, such as the Ahmadiyya, Alevi, Baha’i, Shi’a, and Yazid…
Read More…rply from his immediate predecessors and done it all with a gentle human voice. “Recovering Catholics” who long since abandoned the pelvically obsessed church of the hierarchy are taking a second look. Right wing Catholics are aghast. Jesus’ orthodoxy test was simple. To be one with him is to be “good news to the poor” and suspicious of the exploitative grasping rich. Church history is turning a corner. Reform from the top is a rarity but it is ha…
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…re we are left with an even bigger problem than before: Who made this ultra-complex God? A hyper-complex megaGod? It makes plain sense, according to Occam’s razor, to stop before we get to the first God. The complex universe is enough. Ergo, in all likelihood, God does not exist. This argument, which boils down to Well, who made God, then?, assumes that God is a thing like any other thing. It assumes that God must exist in the same way the moon ex…
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…ant to reach that level. And it’s already given to us,” he added. Yet, half-a-century since legalisation, LGBT+ rights in the country remain a gray area. Madian Al Jazerah is a LGBT+ activist and the owner of Books@cafe, a LGBT+ friendly space. “Although there’s no law that criminalises, there is no law that protects the LGBT+ community,” he said in an interview. When there is physical abuse to the community, police treatment isn’t fair or equal,…
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…se floods even covered all of the earth that the inhabitants of that area knew about. The much-referenced existence of many different local flood legends around the world does not mean that they are all describing the same flood: it means that floods happen everywhere. As Montgomery told me in an interview this fall, “the real insights are in the differences between the flood stories.” And even if we could be sure that, say, the inhabitants of the…
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…ti-gay protesters was overwhelmed by the hopeful, and then celebratory, pro-equality crowd. People carried signs identifying themselves as “Baptists for Marriage Equality” and “Catholics for Equality.” A person wearing a T-shirt from DC’s Wesley Theological Seminary carried a sign declaring, “As Christians, we are called to EVERYONE.” Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion includes only a short reference to the religious liberty battles that a…
Read More…at Allah inhabits all spaces. So, when we remove even the facility of cross-communication in the mosques it borders on the ridiculous. I’m okay with separate spaces, mind you. I am comfortable in them, for the most part. I even prefer them in some situations. I feel more relaxed around only women, Muslim or otherwise. Yesterday, for example, I wrote on Twitter that “I have more in common with a woman who is a stranger than I do with a man, no matt…
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…and protective of [Scientology] than I would have thought.” I know how he feels. Like new religious movement scholars, Anderson appears to be struggling to define his work as neither an attack nor a defense of the religious other, but rather an exploration of it. Like Anderson’s treatment of the oil industry in There Will Be Blood or the pornography industry in Boogie Nights, The Master uses Scientology as a backdrop through which to examine the…
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…rmously popular pastor of the enormous Mars Hill Bible Church, has his own new book coming out this month called Love Wins in which he “puts hell on trial.” The publisher’s book description goes on to assert that Bell’s message is “decidedly optimistic—eternal life doesn’t start when we die; it starts right now. And ultimately, Love Wins.” This short description launched a frenzy of reactions within the evangelical community. Justin Taylor, vice…
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