Religion Dispatches
…George Burns in the Oh God series, Alanis Morissette in Dogma, and Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty. On TV’s The Simpsons and South Park, God is satirically mocked as an old giant with robes and gray hair and a strange looking, insect-eating rodent, respectively. The smash sensation video game, God of War, is now in its third incarnation, showing once again how human glorification of violence often goes hand-in-hand with religious imagery and sym…
Read More…f one could not follow the language, as many in the audience could not. With continued shows like the one in New York, and Farooqi’s success in South Asia, he is well on his way to reviving this tradition….
Read More
…me logic applied to the second clause of the First Amendment, which covers freedom of the press. By his own reasoning, and that of all those who argue for “original intent” in their approach to the Constitution, freedom of the press would not include radio or television or the internet because the founders had no knowledge of these forms of media, just as they did not (according to Moore) know of any religions besides Christianity and Judaism. Doe…
Read More
…in the world. However, the benefits of a frank reckoning with the past, so valuable in other post-conflict settings, exemplified by South Africa, surely apply here as well….
Read More
…th. It’s not about hellfire anymore. Repression has now been repackaged as promotion of mental well-being. Suddenly everything is about low self-esteem: homosexuality, abortions, pornography, premarital sex. The Bush administration mandated in 2006 that high school curricula dependent on federal funding (and at that point 46 of the 50 states took federal funding for abstinence ed) must inform students that sex before marriage could lead to depress…
Read More…’s service as vice president for litigation, and as a board member, of the Indiana branch of the ACLU? Or maybe Hamilton’s extraordinary seven-year-long series of rulings obstructing Indiana’s implementation of its law providing for informed consent on abortion?… Or perhaps Hamilton’s inventive invocation of substantive due process to suppress evidence of a criminal defendant’s possession of cocaine, a ruling that, alas, was unanimously reversed b…
Read More
…ocially influential. The Bakkers even built a theme park, Heritage USA, in South Carolina that not only became one of the premier vacation spots in the nation, it also provided America with the image of the late Jerry Falwell sliding down a water slide while wearing his Sunday best. Unfortunately for their many devoted viewers, the Bakkers’ media reign came to an end in exactly a decade. In 1987 revelations of financial misappropriation and illici…
Read More
…r, more homogeneous time where, at least in geographical enclaves like the South, white evangelical voices went virtually unchallenged. On the left, there is often a similar pining for the era when the “Christian Century” was finally dawning, when Rauschensbusch, Ryan, the Niehbuhrs, and Tillich commanded the national stage, or when mainline leaders took up prominent places alongside King and Heschel in the national Civil Rights Movement. But we a…
Read More
…freaked. I called my editor in a panic and told her there’s no way I could promote a book that made me so uncomfortable just to look at it. I told her it looked like gay erotica. She disagreed, saying she thought it was a warm and inviting cover. “But, see, you live in San Francisco,” I told her. “I live in South Carolina. In San Fran that may be warm and inviting, here, that’s called porn.” The only good thing was that the font had changed to wha…
Read More
…mber 2007, for example, saw lengthy consultations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sahgha Metta project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that “if one part suffe…
Read More