Religion Dispatches
…ly 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 he was there to see if he cou…
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…come. Their understated reaction to the musical suggests that they do. Popular Blasphemy Ultimately it’s disappointing that Trey Parker and Matt Stone—two of the best satirists around—should have chosen such soft religious targets: missionaries from Utah. The finale to season 14 of South Park (the censured episode about the propriety of depicting Mohammed in a bear costume) was gutsier by far. By comparison, poking fun at clueless Mormon teenagers…
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…hts are denied in Xinjiang, properly East Turkestan, except they have no Dalai Lama-like figure to draw attention to their plight. (Who’s going to stand up to China anyway?) Across the border, in Central Asia, Muslims remained ruled by Communist holdovers propped up by a Russia desperate to save its “near abroad”. Having seen what happened to Chechnya, it’s not surprising there’s little move to break free. There are, of course, sadly plenty of con…
Read More…ffers, but because, as a general rule, I like to have some sort of close relationship and trust with the person I get naked with. I plan to share something special with them, so I want to have some feelings before I fall into bed with them. As for clubs, they were never my scene and I ditched them in my 20s. There are plenty of other ways to meet other LGBT people … church, for instance! Certainly, many LGBT people have suffered from sexual abuse,…
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…elevant passage from Revelation 13:18: “let 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…
Read More…f Jews, as Alexander Zaitchik wrote in Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and The Triumph of Ignorance, Beck’s career is actually built on three of the “eight most common social phenomena that precede and accompany genocide,” dehumanization, classification, and polarization. In his twisted propaganda screed against the right’s sworn enemy, he turned Soros into a sub-human, insidious force — the “them” in Beck’s vision of the “us” of “real America” under…
Read More…$500,000, 3,000-square foot wing to his $800,000, 4,500-square foot weekend/retirement home nestled on 8.2 wooded aces in New Jersey’s tony Hunterdon Country. He needed the extra space for “an indoor exercise pool”—the house already has a large outdoor pool—“a hot tub, three fireplaces and a library.” Maybe he could have Boston Cardinal and Francis ally Sean O’Malley over for the weekend. The Franciscan lives in a “rundown rectory” in Boston’s Sou…
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…everywhere. He cites examples of U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency: Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, South Africa, Mozambique. Once he has placed the United States squarely “on the wrong side of the world revolution,” King delivers the gut punch—the part of the speech everyone remembers if they remember it at all: I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values….
Read More…g deprived of educational instruction during the Bible class and that the class violated the First Amendment. Shelly warned board members that the district could be forced to pay $100,000 to $800,000 when it inevitably lost. Board members voted 6-0 last week to immediately end the Bible class, drawing boos from a crowd of students, parents and community members who had shown up to speak in support of the program. In the Chattanooga suburb of Hamil…
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…hat FRC president Tony Perkins was on the GOP committee that drafted that platform last year. In addition to several direct quotes from Sprigg that position same-sex attraction as a sinful choice that can be changed, the authors do not directly critique FRC’s framing of the harmful practice as benign-sounding “sexual reorientation therapy.” Although the article does include boilerplate statements from several leading medical and mental health orga…
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