Religion Dispatches
…icilia received the heartbreaking news while attending a conference in the Philippines. He recalls chain-smoking a pack of cigarettes after hearing the report, unsure of his next move. On returning to Mexico, Sicilia laid his son to rest. At the memorial he read a poem: The world is not worthy of words they have been suffocated from the inside as they suffocated you, as they tore apart your lungs… the pain does not leave me all that remains is a w…
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…piritual reform” during the Cold War. And Anna Su’s recent book, Exporting Freedom, examines the US-occupied Philippines, Japan and Iraq. “[N]o doctrinal position or school can be identified as causing the actions of jihadi groups.” Since 2009, US military chaplains have engaged with local religious leaders overseas to advance American strategic objectives: gathering cultural intelligence, promoting religious tolerance, and patching up relations w…
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…idence in 1900 that God had blessed the genocidal American takeover of the Philippines. He seems unaware of how the inevitable hubris associated with the idea of a national (divine) election continues to let Americans ignore what the rest of the world has long perceived as a brutal and bloody imperalism manifesting itself in places like Vietnam and Iran. I mean, how can God’s anointed nation possibly be doing such awful things? Where white America…
Read More…nn Beck for his “caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left,” charging that he “brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.” Kristol is this close to Roger Ailes and the heart of Fox News, so if Kristol is criticizing Beck, then that means that the sharks, instead of being jumped over by Beck, are in the…
Read More…, I witnessed the Brooklyn diocese transfer back to his home parish in the Philippines a priest I had just interviewed—one among six priests who had taken a teenage girl to an LA hotel room they had rented by the hour—we’ve seen three popes fail miserably and disgracefully to fully come to terms with this crisis. Pope Francis issued his three-page mea culpa nearly a week after the release of a scathing Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on 300 priest…
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…ly, including a court-sized mural depicting Bryant and his daughter in the Philippines. A man in North Carolina even made a custom casket in honor of Bryant that’s currently on display at the Staples Center. During this year’s All-Star game, one team wore Kobe’s number 24, while the other wore number 2, Gianna’s uniform number. The MVP award, given this year to Los Angeles Clippers’ star forward Kawhi Leonard, was renamed permanently for Kobe Brya…
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…urch. Early Christian missionaries went to the continent of Africa and the Philippines and Christianized people with a very, very conservative brand of Christianity. That’s what they were given and that’s what many still believe. We are trying to be a global church that is accepting of all people, and I’m trying very hard to accept my African United Methodist brothers and sisters and make space for them. But at the same time, they are trying to ta…
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…the myriad positive replies which have come from around the world—from the Philippines and Malta to Argentina and New Zealand. If this were a Vatican trial balloon to gauge support for excluding same-sex loving people, it lost air on liftoff and crashed immediately. There are many casualties, especially young people who are taught such nonsense in Catholic schools. Some African Catholics report that their well-being is in jeopardy because of the s…
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…y. So there’s a number of different counterweights there: women need to be free to make choices for themselves, but they need to be faithful to their relationships. Meanwhile, their partner needs to be faithful to the relationship while allowing that person to have some power and some choice. Walter: That’s right. And of course when you say all that, that’s why the issue is so difficult. There isn’t an obvious or simple resolution to it, probably…
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…South Africa in Africa; and, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines in Asia. Each study in the project addresses the extent to which evangelicalism, a religious movement based on biblical orthodoxy, has helped or hindered the inauguration and consolidation of the democratic movement in the global South. This newest volume, on Africa, is edited by Oxford emeritus Terence O. Ranger, and it complements the great work being done by…
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