Religion Dispatches
…believe in that in any case. I often say that if you read the Bible carefully and attentively you could no longer believe in biblical inerrancy. But the whole notion of biblical inerrancy is grounded in the conviction that God directed the people writing these documents in such a way that everything in them has the authority and truth of God. Once we realize, ‘Oh, these are the products of people living within early Christian communities,’ that wh…
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…rs, Eric Byler. The next day was focused on orientation, which included analysis of the court ruling and why it was only a partial victory, background on the immigration crisis, training for civil disobedience and talking points for working with the media. On July 28, Rev. Morales published a Huffington Post piece explaining “Why I’ll be in Phoenix,” which outlined the issues and the denomination’s commitment to protesting SB 1070. Rocking the Pro…
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…en silence, words, images, and sounds.” And, we might add, actions. Blog a bit, tweet a bit, share your favorite liturgical recipes on Facebook if you like, the Holy Father seemed to be saying to the Catholic faithful, but once in a while, for the love of God, zip it. All in all, not a bad idea, but I suspect the silence His Holiness had in mind had nothing to do with the kind of creepy, panoptical Facebook surveillance that led the Rev. Gary LaMo…
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…do the same—for a modest fee, of course. That kind of hucksterism is probably exactly why a guy like Lindell winds up in Donald Trump’s orbit. There he was, near the start of our long national nightmare (no, the other, more recent one), ostensibly to be thanked by Trump for manufacturing N95 surgical masks, but in fact to praise Trump himself and drop nuttery: “God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on,” the pro-Trump…
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…eo clip of a film called The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. And finally, the post-apocalyptic island dwellers read from the sacred scriptures of the old prophet Sonmi-451. It’s all sandwiched by the old man by the fire, Zachry (Tom Hanks), who tells tales of the past. All this is furthered (in a meta-mediated way) as David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, is itself now re-released with an afterword by Mitchell reflecting on the process of…
Read More…ready to go to jumu’ah prayer at my favorite mosque. I think I’m just lonely a bit, since no one in my household is fasting and those nights with my grandson are off. I don’t get enough cuddling. And whoever said writing a blog was like having a friend, was surely wrong. I fast because I believe; I blog because I think. In both there is some sacrifice and some reward. Tomorrow I want to write about the ideas about forgiveness in Islam. And so to…
Read More…ts of ourselves. But the much greater cost is in claiming them. To live fully. To live wholly, but still to be able to say “girl you have to get yur hur did” is beyond the scope, I’m sure, of many of you readers. But that is what it is. Because Prof. Ibrahim and I are also in the same age group, we really have a lot more to work with. It’s almost like we grew up together. We can academize and hang. Even having iftar together was par for the course…
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…s they seem to offer), my freewheeling engagement with the internet is slowly but surely reshaping my brain so that, eventually, I won’t be capable of a sustained reflection. Now, Carr and Clay Shirky have been sparring for some time over the relative merits of digital connectedness and information access, and I’m not unmoved by the cautions Carr raises in The Shallows, the extension of his 2008 Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” But,…
Read More…b Jones on Easter Sunday in 1960, in which he (as I understand it) was partly responding to Billy Graham’s move toward advocating for social reforms in the South. I did a bunch of Google searches related to strings like “sermons on segregation” or “sermons supporting racism” and started compiling phrases similar to what I had been hearing in Springfield. It was actually one of the easier speeches I’ve ever written, mostly because so much of it was…
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…feel, for me to write posts where I have more figured out. That’s not really me, so I’m in a bit of a writing crisis trying to figure that out. I kind of miss the days when I could just work it out. Now, with a couple of books out there, people are starting to treat me the way they treat pastors and I don’t like that. The community on the blog helped make me the writer that I am but I’m in this space now where I’m uncomfortable with the pedestal…
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