Religion Dispatches
…ent person. This is her choice, and fortunately she has maintained regular contact with my family. They even live in the same town as my parents, who feel about the same way I do about her choice of religion. I think that her spiritual path is her choice, she is an adult woman, she can make her own decisions. My problem is now they have two young children, ages 4 and 3, who are being raised as Witnesses. My four-year-old niece has even started ask…
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…primitive belief in contagious magic—that “things which have once been in contact with each other are always in contact.” Many pages of The Golden Bough are taken up with instances of practices that demonstrate this belief: using hair or nail clippings to control people, for example. In other words, Frazer imagined societies giving rise to rulers that were at once symbols of enormous vitality and profoundly susceptible to the possibility of some…
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…evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. [Fiction] writers today are our version of Hebrew and classical prophets: they try to speak to society, to diagnose our social and spiritual condition. I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, for instance, as the search for a Christian political alternative to the Christian Right—and so she turns to the historical terrain of Christian abolitionism for her story….
Read More…o their economic impact and a similar number (58%) report that coming into contact with immigrants who do not speak English bothers them. After Paris, Trump, already on record for border walls and mass deportations, proposed surveilling mosques and even shutting some down. In an appearance on Morning Joe yesterday, Trump said the elimination of a New York Police Department program to spy on Muslims in the city’s mosques and other locations was a “…
Read More…round another person in an airplane aisle knows there will be some sort of contact as you move past; the space just isn’t big enough for most people to avoid that. If your goal is sincerely to avoid contact, it seems to me that remaining in your own seat, lowering your eyes and simply relinquishing your claim to the armrest would be a more effective means of not touching a woman. It seems hard to believe that “hundreds” of men wound up in the same…
Read More…he bill, the Family Research Council sent out an email urging followers to contact their representatives to vote for the bill and “defend it on the House floor.” David Christensen, the group’s Vice President for Government Affairs, added, “The anniversary of Roe v. Wade is not the time to get weak kneed and Members need to hear from you.” Mollie Hemingway’s excoriation of the Republican leadership at The Federalist this morning signals the reactio…
Read More…t want to give the impression that I believe mindfulness practice has lost contact with the source teachings. In fact, I believe the exact opposite: that mindfulness practice, even in its modern form, is probably as close as we can get to the foundational meditation practices taught by the Buddha himself. In the ancient collection of his teachings called the Nikayas, the Buddha taught samatha (calm-abiding) and vipassana (insight) as the foundatio…
Read More…le thrown into a still pool of water ripples out from the center where the contact to the water is made? How the circles that go out from it get wider and wider? That’s the idea that I came up with to explain the merit of good deeds in increments. If the good you do benefits you, say at the point of contact, the one on one, then that is at least as good as that, times two. But when the good you do benefits yourself and others, say one other person…
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…f a gay couple or of their families. They’ve not had that kind of personal contact. It’s this largely moveable middle that I’m trying to reach. My sense is that there are a lot of people out there who need just a little help in getting over the hump to become totally supportive. Have you found, in real life, that the arguments you use in the book have convinced some people in that moveable middle? Actually, I have. There are a lot of people are re…
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…f influenza viruses and research throughout the globe. The Danger of Human Contact Priscilla Wald, a literature professor at Duke, has written on what she calls the “outbreak narrative,” stories of disease in popular culture. As she explains, these stories always take on the social anxieties of their moment—from the anti-immigrant sentiment that surrounded Typhoid Mary to the contemporary concerns of globalization. The emergence of disease, she wr…
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