Religion Dispatches
Anthony Weiner has been a great congressman to New York and beyond. He can stir a crowd. He is unpopular with the moderate Democrats. He is prophetic on the matter of immigration (as well a Queens congressman might be). If only his power and passion could have turned to prophecy, instead of pettiness, we could still have the leader we need. Because he twittered his power away, we might lose this good leader. Lying is not leadership, nor is person…
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…ers in the Apocalyptic AI movement receive attention or accolades from the New York Times or Time the more we can expect their movement to grow. This will present a serious challenge to traditional religious communities, whose own promises of salvation may appear weak in comparison to the “scientific” soteriology offered by Kurzweil. If Moravec was right in proposing that we will upload our minds into machines, then traditional offers of heavenly…
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…spicions were poetically accurate — the bankers met secretly because they knew any proposal identified as Wall Street’s bill would be doomed in the Democratic House of Representatives. After the section on the Fed, amid a jumble of claims that veer from World War II to Vietnam to the Patriot Act to an indictment of Fox News, including superimposing Howard Beale’s rant from Network over an image of Rupert Murdoch, the film also links the Bush famil…
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…speaking, vegetables get all the glory,” Ariel Kaminer lamented in the New York Times, playing the role of the paper’s esteemed Ethicist. And so, in an attempt to buck this trend the paper launched an essay contest in March of this year: in search of the ethical argument for meat. Essays were judged by a star-studded panel that included vocal vegetarians like Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer as well as more cautiously omnivorous foodies such…
Read More…ch to immigration reform signed by state leaders in 2010 and hailed by the New York Times as a model—and one of its key institutional backers, the LDS Church. The LDS Church helped influence the compact design and announced its support in a formal statement issued in November 2010, citing particular concern for “love for neighbors, family cohesion, and the observance of just and enforceable laws.” Pearce represents an ethnocentric red-state Rocky…
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…A week earlier, literary theorist Stanley Fish penned a piece for the New York Times exploring the conflicts that emerge when Muslim immigrants to Western nations “evidence a desire to order their affairs, especially domestic affairs, by Shari’ah law rather than by the supposedly neutral law of a godless liberalism.” Fish is well-known for exposing the tensions between our political ideals and the practical demands of life in a pluralistic societ…
Read More…w, the way forward for the Obama Administration is politically murky, said New York magazine writer Chris Rovzar in a September 10 analysis. “If the Justice Department simply doesn’t appeal the case after this ruling, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ might just go away. If Obama waits for Congress to address the issue, a Republican-led house might reject an overturn,” wrote Rovzar. For Knox, the way forward is clear, and the faith communities he represents…
Read More…n in the post Roe v. Wade era—spurred a generation of scholars to create a new history of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Schuessler’s piece suggests that it was a counter-reaction to George W. Bush’s two terms that has inspired the renewed focus on liberal Protestants; and then, of course, the election of President Obama, coming as he did from a church that was part of mainline Protestantism (a UCC congregation in Chicago). That’s su…
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…tion in a more meaningful context, as he does with regard to the death penalty. He doesn’t seem to know how to nag or scold. For me? I found something to wear with my collar. And have renewed gratitude for the yoke the collar implies. Forty years ordained, I never thought I’d be renewed by a pope or the Pope. And guess what? I am….
Read More…disdain or distaste for polygamy. The most glaring example: last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, wherein reviewer Eric Weinberger feels obliged to denounce polygamy as a “culturally alien and abhorrent practice” and concludes by wishing that Brady had shown “a little less respect” for his protagonist Golden Richards and his four wives. Huh? I wrote Brady and asked him for his reaction: [Weinberger] thinks that I’m not clear-eyed or cr…
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