Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet free promo code india New Zealand

Is America Willing to Be Freed from Its Demons?

…I don’t know if we Americans, especially Christians in America, want to be freed from our demons. The late New Testament scholar Walter Wink defined the demonic as an array of human and supra-human forces aligned to destroy life. The demonic was both individual and structural, personal and collective, sentient and mechanical. Wink’s expansive way of writing about the demonic sought to capture the dynamic interplay of our being oppressed by evil an…

Read More

Wiccan Prayer in Iowa House Highlights Religious Freedom Problem

…heon points out, there is a danger that when we understand ourselves to be promoting pluralism, we are enforcing a tacit division between “good” and “bad” religions (what Leonard Primiano called a “two-tiered model of religion”). A recent example is the fracas that occurred last year when The Satanic Temple offered to re-enact a black mass as part of a Harvard cultural studies club. The Temple’s multicultural performance was quickly reinterpreted…

Read More

Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

…s. White nationalists will support protectionist measures, and they oppose free trade in capital goods because they oppose free trade (or open borders) for labor. Whether or not they gain traction by claiming that the stock market and banks are controlled by Jews depends on whether people of goodwill are able to offer a more compelling vision of change. With Obama in the White House, I think we can expect more of the same, plus some. Some white na…

Read More

Barack Obama, Pro-Life Hero

…g initiatives, conservative activists are finding they may apply religious freedom to any number of disparate issues. Apart from trivializing what ought to be a sacred liberal right, the widespread deployment of religious freedom arguments indicates a weak rhetorical posture. In each of the cases mentioned above, opponents of a particular piece of legislation embraced religious freedom only after other strategies failed to persuade. Such arguments…

Read More

Report from Paris During COP21: Let Us Not Commit Global Suicide

…You can buy a nice meal in a glass dish, which is recycled. You can get a free recyclable cup to drink water out of a fountain. You can sign a climate ribbon (which had its first prom at Judson Memorial Church in New York City) and write on the ribbon what you will miss most when the temperatures rise too far to permit the earth’s amusement. You can enjoy headsets, which allow you to understand the Iranian who is talking about how he saved wetlan…

Read More

Christianity’s Greatest Counterfeit

…tle to do with the worship of a marginalized Jew, named Jesus, who came to free the poor and oppressed. This counterfeit Christian community worships power, desires control, and imagines the world revolving around self-sufficient men (and a few women). I call it “Mad Man Religion.” Mad Man Religion looks just like Christianity. It connects religious practices to free market practices like you would connect pieces from a Lego set. And it offers to…

Read More

“Even the Rich Suffer”: An Interview with Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Chade-Meng Tan

…y, we’re doing this to save money. You get mindfulness but you don’t get a new gym.” They’re saying, “you don’t get a new gym, period.” And then the people who care, the “good” people, see that the school isn’t getting a new gym. Then what? They have to help them some other way. I think your concern is a good concern, but it hasn’t happened in the real world. Deprivation is happening independent of what the mindfulness people are doing. Our intent…

Read More

Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem with Popularization

…me not through serious communitarianism or self-scrutiny, but through self-promotion and free markets. This is a heartening plea. Yet as we continue to debate the proper place of popularization in the academy (and the place of academics in popularization), it is well worth remembering at what cost comes her sermonic accessibility. For as Vowell strains to celebrate Roger Williams’ iconoclasm, she does not do so through careful treads through his p…

Read More

Far-Right Evangelicals And The Campaign Against Obama

…ht are the ultimate camp followers. They’re latching onto government for a free ride while decrying it. They want to overthrow the present order from the inside in the name of God. The result is that there are two kinds of far-right evangelicals: the ones who make a public show of their animosity toward the president, accusing him of not being an American citizen, for example. They even say Obama has a secret plan to kill old people within his hea…

Read More

Republican Lauren Boebert Jokes About AR-15s and Jesus — And Yes, She’s a ‘Real’ Christian

…hrist.” She goes on, “We came to Jesus, because we were bound, we were not free. But Jesus paid the ultimate price to set us free for all of eternity.” No, there’s simply no tenable case to be made that Boebert is not a “real” Christian. She is very much a Christian. She is also a terrible person. And if we can’t get it through our heads that it is very possible to be both of those things at the same time, we will never effectively counter the cor…

Read More