Religion Dispatches
…Dialogue at Cambridge, founded by Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International. Consider the Bay Area-based Buddhist Peace Fellowship, which mobilizes dozens of chapters and thousands of members around important social and political issues. Consider publications like Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and Shambhala Sun (for whom I blog) that have found appeal beyond just their target demographic. Consider the work of Buddhists in professional…
Read More…nd injustice,” said Richard Stearns, president and CEO of World Vision, an international relief organization and collaborator on the Bible project. I’m not sure that it’s because the Bible is “outdated” that so many people can’t pick out scripture verses dealing with issues of poverty and justice. The poll really proves that the religious right has so thoroughly hijacked the real message of the Bible that when people quote passages about helping t…
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…aker at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting, is a subject of international fame and infamy; yet this infamy seems less tied to the revolutionary political agenda advanced in his work than to that central and most controversial fact—that Ramadan is a Muslim. Indeed, for Ramadan, all of his thought and work emerges from his acceptance of the claim that the one and only God, Allah, creator of the universe, twice offered Revelations of H…
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…ater renamed the Worldwide Church of God, and now known as Grace Communion International). This Adventist offshoot was fervently pre-millennialist, and Armstrong saw in Wolverton’s grotesque style the perfect means of capturing and communicating the horrors of the tribulation. And horrific the illustrations are—with their crashing planes, erupting volcanoes, boil-stricken sufferers, and monstrous whirlwinds—Wolverton’s literalist depictions of Rev…
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…narrator composes a blog that chronicles his city’s struggles and wins an international following. The novel contains several plotlines, including the narrator’s own difficulties in forging personal relationships, his need for and fear of social isolation, and the impromptu groups that emerge to care for victims of the crisis. But what makes American Fever compelling is that way that Hall has insinuated the novel within existing networks of infor…
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…scended on Burbank, California earlier this month for the Atheist Alliance International 2009 convention. The main topic? The great harm done throughout history by religion: the single most dangerous human creation. The welfare of humanity, it was argued, depends on the dismantling of religion and all of its delusions. The possibility of collaboration, of compromise, of any shared ethical commitments between theists and non-theists, was not on the…
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…e on the stage, a “false prophet” (16:13)—the Antichrist—who will lead his international satanic army against the forces of God. All these satanic forces will be gathered together “at the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon” (16:16). Abruptly, a white horse bearing a divine warrior will appear from heaven, a warrior described as “The Word of God” (19:13), whom many interpret to be Christ; he will lead the “armies of heaven” (19:14) in a vast and bl…
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…vangelicals. While few adopted the Reconstructionist theology wholesale, a number of Christian Right leaders were tantalized by the idea of restoring America to their view of the America as a Christian nation ordained by God and under the leadership of Godly men. The result was a broad tendency that critics call ‘Dominionism’ which comes in both hard and soft varieties in terms of theocratic authoritarianism. Stephen McDowell, Providence’s co-foun…
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…c mind during the late nineteenth century. Spencer’s many followers, whose numbers comprised a virtual social register of the Anglo-American moneyed elite, typically embraced Darwinism as well. In his Autobiography, for example, Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie recalled the day in the 1870s that his reading of Darwin’s Descent of Man, Haeckel’s History of Creation, and various books by Spencer transformed his life. “I remember that…
Read More…ticularly like. He quotes Frederick Barton of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who tracks our country’s growing reliance on civilian mercenaries. Barton observes that “no one really knows whether having a force made up mainly of contractors whose salaries were often triple or quadruple those of a corresponding soldier or Marine was cheaper or more expensive for the American taxpayer.” Excuse me? “No one really knows”?? I’m not a…
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