Religion Dispatches
…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
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…t. International pilgrimages are much easier now, at least for the middle class that can afford plane tickets to Medjugorje and Civitavecchia. Pilgrims learn from major apparition sites exactly how to watch for the Virgin and what to do when someone spots her. And it’s much easier for the news of an apparition to reach reporters, now that visionaries and their witnesses use video cameras and the World Wide Web. President Obama made the news last w…
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…e Common Good, favors making abortion illegal, and only views reducing the number of abortions as an interim step toward that goal. It is hard to take seriously a movement that thinks they can dramatically reduce the number of abortions while largely ignoring or denying the issue of access to contraception—including emergency contraception. One understands that they feel their hands are tied by the official position of the Catholic church against…
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…the stage for two long days. While there’s good reason to worry about the number of high-ranking military officers who used the ReAwaken rally to declare war on their political opponents—while attacking US elections and a free press—it was the voices of civilian preachers like Pastor Burns who delivered the most bellicose speeches of the event, unfailingly leaning into violent religious rhetoric. One by one, they warned that the time for battle i…
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…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…
Read More…tory courses at a Russian university, and I still push the envelope a bit. Last spring, I facilitated a heated debate about Pussy Riot in my Religion and Society class after a Russian student gave a presentation on the trial that involved her distributing copies of the lyrics of the “Punk Prayer.” That resulted, some weeks later, in a panicked phone call from an administrator asking if I had taught Pussy Riot lyrics. The incident blew over, but th…
Read More…” But comedian Stephen Fry said in an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show last Saturday that he had a “well founded” source for a story about Elizabeth: “It was only last summer that Her Majesty The Queen gave the Royal Assent,” he said. “When the Queen signed the Royal Assent for the equal marriages act, allowing gay people to marry for the first time, she put it down and said “Well, who’d have thought 62 years ago when I came to the throne, I’d…
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…nks. You have to determine that on your own.” Haggard’s weekly Oval Office phone calls and grip and grin NAE photo ops with former President George W. Bush are now mere vestiges of an old life, prior to what he calls the “crisis.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggar…
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…beca Grand; when my Christian neighbor told me she was getting threatening phone calls because of her Arab last name; when a Hindu Indian friend told me her kids were getting beaten up on the school bus. The irony of my T-shirt hit me then. I threw it away. I never felt like Muslim values—tolerance, compassion, generosity, honesty—were at odds with American ones. My elders often told us that the United States was the only true Muslim country, the…
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…armed against. War in the name of faith is a recurring theme, as with cell-phone videos of beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dichotomy is spread wide, with ISIS on one end and the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it i…
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