Religion Dispatches
…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…
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…nd demonstrating how it contradicts the Christian life and message.” The Armor of Light opens in theaters in 20 cities on Friday. Tickets are free for NRA members….
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…peratives –rules on how to spoon food on plates, appropriate body odors, prohibitions on coughing and sneezing—were mandated. As a “guest” at Osho, I was expected to pay up and shut up. I’m not naïve. Religious institutions and spiritual movements need money. I’ve paid for High Holiday tickets, passed the plate at church, and dropped bills into the basket at yoga class. But Osho’s opacity and its denial of the obvious (robes and shampoos, wine and…
Read More…maintaining their “ex-gay” status. One slip can be deadly to a career, as John Paulk discovered years ago after being caught leaving a Washington DC gay bar. Wyler’s “balance” in this story is questionable. While it’s true that the other man featured in the piece, Peterson Toscano, is an artist and performer who has made a living off of plays written about his “ex-gay” experience, the difference is striking. Toscano is not invested in drawing peop…
Read More…reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my parking tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity.” Gone, too, from Osteen’s theology is any mention of topics that might intrude on happy thoughts: Osteen avoids using current events in his messages so he doesn’t get sidetracked in controversy….
Read More…ng financial regulatory bill.” So who do you suppose is buying high-priced tickets to these events? Well, you could get an idea about that from a profile in today’s Times on the rise and rise of corporate fixer Tony Podesta (“The Proud Lobbyist” reads the Times headline). Tony boasts that he lobbied on 25 different issues related to Wall Street regulation for major players like Bank of America. And yes, this proud lobbyist is indeed the brother of…
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…ives, Richard and Joan Ostling’s investigative nonfiction Mormon America, John Krakauer’s polemical nonfiction Under the Banner of Heaven, Martha Beck’s scandalous memoir Leaving the Saints, David Ebershoff’s experimental fiction The 19th Wife, Brady Udall’s tragicomic novel The Lonely Polygamist, and the South Park episode about Joseph Smith (who also shows up as one of the “Super Best Friends” in other episodes satirizing religion). If attention…
Read More…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…
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…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…
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…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…
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