Religion Dispatches
…on the danger of having no feelings around the knowledge we possess. These days we have dozens of progressive think tanks, all eager to tell us how gruesome the unemployment and discouraged worker numbers continue to be, and how desperation and depression are taking their toll for millions who struggle for a livelihood. If there is any passion at all in these recitations, it is a passion in the head. Better than none, I suppose. But if we want to…
Read More…gram in southern Oregon. Our small group of students had spent a couple of days on the Oregon Coast, and on our way back to Ashland we stopped for dinner. Hatfield was conducting a meeting with constituents in an adjacent room, and the director of our program, called the Oregon Extension, stopped in to introduce himself. Seventeen years later, I interviewed Hatfield in his Washington office for a PBS documentary on Billy Graham. As the cameras wer…
Read More…tion appears to be out of print. I’m going with what we know about both films from critics and historians, and that’s actually quite a lot. Noah’s Ark is usually referenced today in conversations about the hazards of filmmaking, particularly in Hollywood’s early, unregulated days. Michael Curtiz was a famously rude and possibly sadistic director. He shot the flood scene below by cramming a few hundred unsuspecting extras on a soundstage and dumpin…
Read More…sion. The younger ones—including middle and high school students—are given days off by their Catholic schools to enjoy a school sponsored (and in some cases paid for) trip to the Nation’s Capital. The older ones are college students who make a road trip of it, knowing that a night on a church floor and a day that begins with mass at the Verizon Center is a good way to meet (do they hook up, one wonders) other young people with similar theo-politic…
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…be, the film’s disaffected voters says, “a con artist” who “just wanted to get up there and show off.” Only 28 more days….
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…well. Go to top Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell Tom Bissell Vintage 2017 Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell (2016) – An author of tremendous range, empathy, and curiosity, Tom Bissell is a journalist who writes his stories by fully and completely considering his subjects. This has been true since his earliest published work Chasing the Sea, which built on his Peace Corps experience to inve…
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…rged manacle. Of course I want to say, “yes, without doubt,” but that undersells the pressures and defense mechanisms some religions, sects, and religious communities have evolved to keep people enthralled, a short list of which I include in The Founding Myth: “persecuting outsiders, shunning doubters, punishing interfaith marriages, punishing apostates (sometimes with death), homeschooling or religious schooling, gathering together to shout down…
Read More…evented the women in our tent from creating an immediate community for the days ahead. At one point, the group leader wanted to inform the men and women together about the rites of Mina, Arafat, Ramy Jamarat and Muzdhalifah, but the women could not see to open the tent between ours and the men. Thus a cultural enclave now took precedent over simple information. At this point then I knew I could not share my experience with the others, so I made my…
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…ality could go and share that. MCC was not a place that I knew of in those days [and I didn’t even know] if there was one in Orlando back then. So for me, as a 19-year-old kid, Exodus was the safe place. When I walked in, they didn’t beat me over the head with a Bible, they were a bunch of people who said, We get it. You’re welcome here and you can struggle along with the rest of us. The negative, or detriment, of Exodus is the same as the church,…
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…overnment to condemn the march. According to the Taipei Times, a couple of days before the parade, dozens of Christian protesters organized by the International Christian Torch Vanguard Service and Ministry Association protested outside legislative chambers: While many protesters held placards and occasionally broke into chants in support of “family values,” raised hands and speaking in tongues were also prevalent, with protesters closing their ey…
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