Religion Dispatches
If Scientists are the West’s last priestly class then Freeman Dyson might be our greatest heretic. Nicholas Dawidoff’s profile of the brilliant physicist in the New York Times Magazine illuminates a man who has always sought to subvert scientific consensus—most recently in denying the dangers of climate change and CO2 emissions. The story’s title, “The Civil Heretic,” signals the ghost of religion hanging in the background. It is the “secular rel…
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…and highly imaginative, scholar of American literature. He did not let the class neglect the crucial detail, revealed near the book’s end, that our stalwart narrator has been confined to a sanitorium, and may not be quite the trustworthy reporter he would have us believe him to be. So the book was far more than a manifesto for the mid-teen audience horrified by the overwhelming influence of “phonies” in the adult world. It was a cautionary tale ab…
Read More…ommonly attendant to urban living. Even his name is a sly joke for working class sophisticates, common men who’d know enough about culture to be able to whistle “Fanfare for the Common Man,” another populist delusion penned in 1942. That doesn’t sound like Sarah Palin. Too many Obama supporters have been too quick to prove Palin right when she spoke of the snobs who look down on people like her. Palin is from a small town, and her interests are th…
Read More…assed. To them, passing the bill was about helping the poor and the middle class, and they even enlisted Obama to perform on a conference call to prove how much his faith informed his action. See how this will never be good enough for the conservatives? If they don’t like the health care law at all, then Obama talking about how there’s a moral imperative to have health care reform won’t make them think he’s faithy. Nor will talking about Jesus. Th…
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…e for me to explain away the Bush Doctrine as oil and realpolitik, or even class resentment, until I spent a day at a “prophecy conference” in a packed church in affluent Santa Barbara, California. Don’t worry about human suffering in the Middle East, the pastors taught, worry about God’s will. People nodded and took notes, and in that room everything I thought I knew about the world felt worthless before the vision of mystical order. Talk like th…
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…Likud Party, Martin Buber has become the whipping boy of its intellectual class; his pacifist and humanist legacy has been mocked. Likewise, in India the Hindu Right and the BJP government of the late 1990s rejected M.K. Gandhi’s ideas. Gandhi remains an Indian national icon, but non-violence is not the Indian national idea. His own party, Congress, rejected his ideas. Salman Rushdie has famously remarked that: ”these days, that (Gandhi’s) messag…
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…e philosophic version of the traditional beliefs in angels. Moses was in a class of his own among humans, but he was neither an angel nor God; Moses remains human and was able to translate his profound understanding into laws that guide human action. In other words, even in regards to Moses, Maimonides was clear not to erase the boundaries between the human and the divine, and to acknowledge the humanity of Moses. But it is precisely the boundary…
Read More…ergy, and—you guessed it—human sexuality. After review, the films are then classified into the following categories: A-I—general patronage, A-II—adults and adolescents, A-III—adults, L—limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling, and O—morally offensive. Here is a sampling of movies in a few of the categories: A-I: The USCCB Office of Film and Broadcasting denotes that this category is rare as “nowadays…
Read More…The Pew Research Center has found that American Muslims are mostly middle-class and mainstream; Islam is one of many American faiths. During the Ramadan that fell in December of 2001, Pope John Paul II urged Christians to fast for one day in solidarity with Muslims. I was so moved that I felt a rush of gratitude and awe. The “solidarity fast“ was evidence that, instead of using Ramadan—a holiday that reminds us to empathize with others—to instiga…
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…ear their fingertips on guitar strings and scream unintelligibly into microphones. All the elements of the indie scene announce themselves: the spiky haircuts, the leather, combat boots, the wide eyes, the acne. At one recent show, Matt Koldinski… took the mike and did something that would be unthinkable at most hardcore shows. Panting and solemn, he appealed to his audience of peers to come up to him after the show, to talk about their problems a…
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