Religion Dispatches
…r life, respect for property, sobriety, etc. all seem identical to Western codes of conduct, they arise differently in Buddhism. The Decalogue was revealed by divine commandment. In Buddhism, there’s no creator deity. Nor is there any central Buddhist institution, such as a Vatican. Rather, in establishing one of humanity’s first monastic orders, the Buddha set forth a matrix and process of conscious behavior (vinaya) based on actual conduct. As s…
Read More…entirely.” It’s disturbing the number of assaults on women’s reproductive freedom that have taken place in the past couple months, from bills that would deny private insurance companies from providing abortion coverage to congressional Republicans’ proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood’s family services, which would include cancer screenings. But none have been as stomach-lurching as a South Dakota bill that could make it legal to murder abort…
Read More…at all. During and after Reconstruction, there is no mention of the Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, or sharecropping; the term “Jim Crow” never appears. Incredibly, racial segregation is only mentioned in a passing reference to the 1948 integration of the armed forces. Or this section: Texas’s heavily politicized 2010 revisions to its social studies curriculum have attracted massive national attention. Indeed, both in public hearings and press int…
Read More…to blacks—portrayed President Obama as an emissary to this world of secret codes and seditious intent, and his much-lauded religious freedom speech in Cairo as evidence of that. . . . [National Review contributor Andrew] McCarthy, author of the books The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America and How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda, links both President Obama and the American left to this supposed plot, claiming that they share…
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…tonement, via the spilling of their own blood and the risking of their own freedom, for the sins of nuclear violence and idolatry. To ensure metaphysical efficacy, the action adhered to a ritual template that has remained strikingly consistent since the first Plowshares action — trespass, blood, hammers. But another crucial element of the Plowshares’ actions is the wait to be apprehended, which illuminates the ways in which the actions are meant t…
Read More…I met some of the women who defended one of these. She was set eventually freed and one of the arguments of defense was the “sleeping fetus.” A husband returns to his wife after a long absence and resumes sexual relations. The wife produces a child and even if it was in, say, four months’ time, that’s okay, the jurist says — because the fetus went to sleep and was awakened with the father’s return, so it is his child! In the other case, the man a…
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…the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it is far from free. Inherent in Christianity—in the system of thought, not just its history—are empire and violence, Krieger argues, particularly a mode of subjugation and submission to servitude—and its lacerations—that renames abuse as saintliness. Of this she is dubious, though like all good mystics she remains faithful withi…
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…l likely have longer-term effects, possibly even on the children’s genetic codes. Yet one group has remained largely silent: the “pro-family” movement comprised largely of conservative white evangelicals. Many evangelical leaders, such as Paula White, who chairs the White House Evangelical Advisory Board for Donald Trump, claim the tearing apart of families is justified by blaming the parents as criminals. White went so far as to claim that Jesus…
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…ng Jesus conveys the same conservative politics, but with different racial codes. O’Reilly served as an Executive Producer for the film, which was made by Ridley Scott’s production company as Fox was absorbing National Geographic in 2015. Importantly, this was one of Scott’s first projects after receiving substantial criticism for hiring white actors to play Egyptians in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). In response to this criticism, Scott hired act…
Read More…acteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction.” That “race” is a pseudo-scientific social construct is besides the point, Morrison would remind us. Of course race is a pseudo-scientific social construct, but that doesn’t mean that real people don’t live with and suffer under the legacies of racism. Playing in the Dark is a helpful rejoinder to every self-satisfied prig who sanctimoniously informs…
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