Religion Dispatches
…ng. He turned out to be straight. So I moved on to another man and started flirting. He was straight, too. Then I saw Gary. He had hair like Albert Einstein’s, and I thought, “No gay guy would have hair like that. He must be straight as well.” But we started talking about what we would do with our bodies once we died. Would we donate them to medical schools? To other types of research? Compost? We actually bonded over this, happy to find someone w…
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…According to Phra Thepyanmahamuni, the abbot of the Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Thailand, Jobs was reincarnated into a divinity “of middle rank – half a Witthayathorn, half yak.” The Thai Buddhist New Religious Movement posted a three-part essay on their website describing the life, death, and reincarnation of Jobs, claiming that he also invented the wind-mill in a previous life to predict natural disasters. The essay is illustrated with enough CGI moc…
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…ians reached out to Religion Dispatches and directly to me asking why I conflated white terrorism with Christian nationalism. They eloquently noted that the shooter (whose name I shall not use) did not use Christian theology, but espoused anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views that seemed disconnected from religion. But in making that argument, they might be missing a larger point: white Christian nationalism isn’t religious (or even grounded in rel…
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…ixed definitions in real life. They change with the times. While this fact flummoxes quantitative sociological studies, which depend on precise categories, we have to keep our language flexible so we can accurately understand what’s going on in the world. We all ask ourselves what’s real and how best to know reality. We all wonder about the good life and what makes things right and wrong. If the word “religion” means belief in supernatural forces,…
Read More…an government had been working with Rainbow Refugee to help settle gay men fleeing persecution in Chechnya. in a follow-up, the Globe and Mail reported on the ongoing struggles facing the refugees: Organizers working with LGBT refugees stressed that they are not saying sexual minorities deserve greater assistance than other refugees, only that they often have special needs, having in the case of the Chechens fled imprisonment, torture and the thre…
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…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
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…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…
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…that this is exactly what has not been happening in Uttarakhand. Both the flash flooding itself and the resultant destruction—both of human life and of property—may have partially derived from a terrible combination of preexisting conditions: unplanned construction without regulation, deforestation, hydroelectric dam construction, and an unwillingness to slow down the pace of development in the face of ever-rising numbers of visitors to the regio…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
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…k a certain way about, say, virginity, or sovereignty, those triggers that flip circuits such that suffering immediately flashes in the backs of our mind as redemptive, death as sacrifice, and so on. Poison, she might say: brainwashing with a dirty sponge. Despite Simmons’s hagiographic comment regarding originality, the work of Giving Godhead is not without both ancestral figures and fellow-travelers—from De Sade, referenced in these pages, to hi…
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