Religion Dispatches
…f this theistic, personalistic, transcendent God—no, I don’t buy that. The way I always define the divine is the rising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away or, as I have already suggested, the infinite creative process. There isn’t a divine creator, but creativity is divine. Creativity is an emergent process, and creation always entails destruction. I’ve rethought this in terms of these complex information-processing because…
Read More…mbers of the Eagle Forum were trying to wrest control of the organization away from Schlafly, precisely because she got on board the Trump train rather than rally for the rather more obvious primary candidate of the religious right, Ted Cruz. She fought back—even against some of her own family members—and stayed the course. Schlafly claimed victory over the Nelson Rockefeller Republican establishment in the 1960s, and over the current Republican e…
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…ia to end: The war has eviscerated domestic anti-poverty efforts; war is always “the enemy of the poor.” War punishes the poor in a second way by sending the poorest to do the fighting and dying; King is scandalized that the United States finds it possible to make poor whites and poor Blacks fight and kill Asians together but won’t allow them to be schooled together here at home. War’s organized lethal violence represents a defeat for the wider ca…
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…lace in Lo and Behold. Behind an image of Tibetan monks staring into their phones with the Chicago skyline behind them Herzog asks “Have the monks stopped meditating? They all seem to be tweeting.” But the power of the internet is not in a few addicts who can’t pull themselves away from their screens, rather it’s in its omnipresence. Herzog avoids the everday aspect of the net (and attendant statistics) looking instead for the colorful and odd ind…
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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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…a wry humor with a silly streak, and a proclivity toward community. I put away my phone in order to devote free time to art, music, and curating opportunities for togetherness. I turned to studying music and religion as a graduate student, keenly aware of the powerful ability of both to link us and give us identity. I put those who had passed through my life on their own shelf, held tenderly in my memory, thankful for the growth, the joy, the awak…
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…Gotanda said, “I think Obama is the first Asian-American president, in the way that Bill Clinton was the first black president. Obama’s personal history, the way he’s been treated, and the whole birther movement….only makes sense if you see it as sort of racialized in the Asian-American foreignness kind of way.” Gotanda, though, does see something new in Trump’s proposal. “What’s new is this kind of religious based—nominally religious based—exclus…
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…
Read More…l with what I say in the classroom since. Self-censorship is, I think, the way most LGBT Russians and their allies deal with the legal situation today. If it’s hard to find many instances of the anti-“propaganda” law being enforced in practice, everyone realizes that the potential is there. Those LGBT people who are publically out here show a heroic level of bravery. The law that passed in June—which is, I think, best explained as cheap populist s…
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…d temporality, sinks a spade into a whole cluster of theologically fraught ways of thinking and being, raising—as Jack Neudorf pointed out in Art Forum—some important questions for an age in which digital oversharing of confidences generally occurs sans any sense of catharsis. In an earlier series of photographs of defaced icons, Calle prompts reflexive readings of martyrdom, facelessness rendering such statues more uncanny, even transcendent. A n…
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