Religion Dispatches
No, the sky didn’t fall with today’s SCOTUS decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The Court majority siding with the Green family took care to claim that the decision’s impact will be very limited. They framed it as a narrow decision. Many are likely to shrug and say, “So what?” The sky didn’t fall today. But the air is now ionized differently, and folks with a good nose for weather know that storms are surely coming. In this ruling, the fundamenta…
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…“one man betrayed with a kiss” was a reference to Jesus. It was not until high school that I learned the significance of “April 4”: “Shot rings out in the Memphis sky/ They took your life/ They could not take your pride.” I unknowingly had been honoring King’s life and death for all those years. Thanks to U2, King and Christ had been lodged in the musical memory of this adolescent white kid from New Jersey. It was only when writing a book on Jesu…
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…out in the corner and more like flying—like cutting through a cool October sky with nothing below the feet? An absurd fantasy, surely, but Jaron Lanier (a legendary techie, so intimately involved with the birth of virtual reality he’s been called its “father”) is increasingly prophesying a digital world where such bodily urges are taken seriously. Writing for the Wall Street Journal last month, he suggested that the greatest “cognitive adventure”…
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…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
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…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…
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…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…
Read More…it by the pollsters. That low level of information aside (it was actually higher than for any of the other laws), there’s no doubt that homophobia in Russia is frighteningly widespread. The breakdown with respect to approval or disapproval was as follows: 42% of respondents were definitely for the law, with another 25% leaning that way. Only 5% of respondents were leaning against the law, while a paltry 2% were definitely against it. 26% were und…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
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…uild a church in Colorado Springs than the rapid population boom fueled by cheap land that would lead to a new free market Christianity political power base in the Western United States. In less than a decade, Haggard built one of the most influential megachurches in the nation. Not Everybody Loves a Comeback Story Today, Haggard and his wife Gayle jet set nearly every weekend to speak at emergent churches across the nation with a well-worn script…
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…d the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging the exemption in the spring. The large number of Catho…
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