Religion Dispatches
…right and wrong, useful and useless. Are only my words useful? If so, then everyone else’s are useless. Is only the truth useful? Then my own words are useless, because I pass my own words off as the words of others. If you can learn to see the useless as useful, you will find the vast ocean of the Tao is waiting for you.”…
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…very religion. And when you give someone absolute power, absolute power corrupts. That more than anything is what frustrated me, because there’s still this sense of denial. On Amazon at first I had a string of one-star reviews from people saying, “This doesn’t happen in Mormonism. If you want to know the truth, go to Mormon.org.” Or someone would say, “I can tell just from reading the description that this woman knows nothing about Mormonism. She…
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…the conundrums of contemporary Catholic life. For instance, they include struggles with sexuality and abortion that pit women against structures and teachings that they’ve had no input into creating. The composite stories that make up the characters in the play are mostly women who have been brought up asking Catholic kinds of questions. But their consistent choices for other than institutional Roman Catholic Church moral policy—whether the nun wh…
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…y Alsup, the former leader of women’s ministry at Mars Hill whom Driscoll truly respected, critiqued Real Marriage in February 2012 and later ex-elder Jeff Bettger felt compelled to share his story online in December 2013, other leaders began to come forward and tell their stories publicly, regardless of the repercussions. This shift from outsider voices critiquing Driscoll to insiders sharing their stories is perhaps best exemplified in a recent…
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…hey love to be a part of the experience and to hear what’s involved in the stories. I think it’s really rare. Seattle’s one of the least churched cities in the country if not the world, definitely in the U.S. There are very few churches that are active in Seattle, and it’s certainly declining around the country in a lot of ways. Having a place where people can connect and be in a community where they feel welcome and as safe as possible in a publi…
Read More…riends skip into a junkyard, they take the discarded objects and teach the world how to live just and caring lives. Holey socks become parable-preaching hand puppets. Broken down cars and musical instruments become the vehicles and horns of the gospel story. Forty years before the Occupy Movement would seek to reclaim and redeem urban spaces, the figures in Godspell were doing so in the abandoned lots of New York City. Martin Scorcese’s adaptation…
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…w! You’re in the garden of earthly delights, and you just keep eating the fruit!” Just to get them thinking about it. “Sit there for two minutes and think about when you ate the fruit last.” They go, “Oh yeah, okay, I guess I understand that. I don’t make them tell me what they did! Is there like a dream you have for how this object-centered history of religion would manifest itself in the world; do you have ambitions or visions for that? I’m invo…
Read More…s role as mean girl racist cheerleader, is still beating Breitbart’s fake drums of scandal even after his death. Palin’s offensive word salad on Sean Hannity was a Tour de farce in her attempt to turn people away from the HBO movie Game Change which focuses in on the choice of Palin as the vice presidential candidate and the trouble that ensued from bringing her on the Republican Ticket. Palin has been in full-tilt mode, bringing out her supporter…
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…mises simplicity and security and delivers neither,” but you do refer to a world that was “not yet ready for atheism.” Do you believe the world is now ready for atheism? As long as there is fear, it will never be fully ready. Fear makes you reach for a supernatural insurance policy. But yeah, I think so. As I was dealing with Catholics who were slowly liberalizing, the most common thing I would hear after giving a talk is, “I’ve always felt that.”…
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…h the totalist version of that certainly has led to a lot of death and destruction, but the assumption that we can do almost anything in the environment that sustains us and it’ll be OK. LW: It’s true the idea of hubris or human overreaching implies that there’s a God, or gods, deciding how far is too far to reach. And, as you mention in the book, there’s a powerful dystopian sci-fi legacy that takes that equation to heart: we create artificial in…
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