Religion Dispatches
…her events of the festival circuit (Lollapalooza, Coachella, Austin City Limits), Bonnaroo is a top-down affair staged by skilled, professional producers. In 2007, the festival revenues reportedly topped $17 million, making it the highest-grossing event of its kind in the world. Yet the planners behind Bonnaroo must know about the camp meeting tradition as well, because they promote the event as offering more than a spectacular music delivery syst…
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…of color in Missouri, it’s just part of the normal experience. You go five miles over the speed limit, you sit in jail for two weeks.” “The entire history of St. Louis is of certain people being oppressed so that other groups could advance. In order to benefit one community, they would disenfranchise another.” Even St. Louis’ most nationally recognized symbol, the Gateway Arch, towering over the St. Louis skyline from where our group stood on the…
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…plunge into a pool of progressive partners. Multiethnic churches and urban ministries will play tour hosts. Sojourners magazine is an event co-sponsor—no small potatoes considering the mainstream cachet of Jim Wallis, the founder /editor of Sojourners and author of the chart burner, God’s Politics. And McLaren has friends outside the faith box too. The Sierra Club is signed up. You tell me the last time people paid for tickets to a preacher-meets-…
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…kshops on laughing and crying, seeking the feminine, primal feelings and family dynamics. Classes were an hour but courses could take weeks or months. Prices were consistent with similar offerings in New York or Los Angeles. But I was unaware of either the multiversity’s curricula or its cost when I began my own journey of self-exploration. I was intent on paying my bill, attending orientation and returning my white robe for a perkier, more flatte…
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…ival. Because they do, of course, all end with a smile. Or a clown’s tear. Michael Clayton smirking at the back of a cab; Juno grinning as her lover’s duet concludes; even Tommy Lee Jones staring, knowingly, into the desert beyond. Sundance didn’t spare us, either: the suicidal sister sits amiably for Kodak, and Dennis the muscle-bound German dims the bedside lamp. The Finnish farmer felon bakes a great baker’s dozen, and the murdering New Orleans…
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…we are facing the transcendent challenge of the 21st century — radical Islamic extremism. Not long ago in Baghdad, al Qaeda took two young women who were mentally disabled, and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a marketplace and, by remote control, detonated those suicide vests. If that isn’t evil, you have to tell me what is. And we’re going to defeat this evil. And the central battleground according to David Petraeus and Osama bin Laden…
Read More…been a fan of assumptions, and the ones presented by the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party seem especially alarming: “unclothed” = immodest = dangerous. That’s more of an article than Rihanna putting on a longer skirt. Second, it seems hypocritical: you’ll host a concern for and buy tickets to see a female performer sing songs about things that are totally haram (according to different opinions), but not if she’s wearing clothing you find inappropriate?…
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…dominantly black, a stadium full of white people who paid more than a Benjamin for tickets is not going to be the nexus for authentic justice conversations. I work for a white, affluent, suburban, mega-church, so I’m used to that. But at that moment, before the music even started, I knew what my friend was referencing—I was about to get spiritual too. “They knew they were born to weep and keep the morticians employed as long as they pledge allegia…
Read More…Back from my Bloggingheads hiatus, I talk with Get Religion’s Mollie Hemingway about whether Mitt Romney’s plan to discuss his Mormonism tonight at the Republican National Convention benefit his candidacy: And we also discussed the significance of the fact that Barack Obama is the only Protestant on both presidential tickets: …
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…a supportive Instagram video, tagged with “I’d like you to meet who Prime Minister @JustinPJTrudeau called the ‘fringe minority.’ Tell me what you think of this video.” It features the Jericho March, among others, and is was set to “Amazing Grace,” which was sung loudly by the mob on January 6. The Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a noted QAnon-adjacent radical traditionalist Catholic, gave a talk that linked the convoy expressly to “a worldwide ch…
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