Religion Dispatches
…n, including one in which Buddha is snorting cocaine and Jesus is watching internet porn. Some of the clips strike me as funny. Some not so. Which actually makes my point. Satire is supposed to offend. And in doing so, it can challenge our assumptions and force us to rethink how we view the world. Did Jonathan Swift really believe the British should eat the infants of the poor? Did Mark Twain really think Huck Finn was damned to hell for helping a…
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…revivals and camp meetings from the nineteenth century forward, the festivals allow participants to suspend their everyday lives to engage in something that is both theatrical and ecstatic. Events like Burning Man, an eight-day annual event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, have attracted particular scholarly attention for the way that they allow participants to create impromptu communities, to be arbiters of their own rules, and to create thic…
Read More…that those who leave the church are understood to lack any chance of eternal salvation? Any sort of religious belief? A moral compass? Compassion? An interior life? A sensitivity to truth and beauty or other things Mormons consider related to “the spirit”? The FM response acknowledges that believers might choose to “shun” their “‘spiritually dead’ loved ones” before complaining that Some new non-believers, on the other hand, sometimes wants to sh…
Read More…ular at its base, and this is the consequence. Once you accept the historically flawed idea that “American” equals “Christian,” you of necessity must see “Muslim” as “anti-American.” Muslims do not accept the fundamental belief of Christianity, that Jesus was the Son of God and savior of the world. Thus, in this closed world view, they are “anti-Christian” and so are also inherently “anti-American.” This is one of the dangers of the increasingly p…
Read More…y Ms. Halappanavar’s request for an abortion was denied. (University Hospital Galway, where she died, is not a Catholic hospital.) Those who defend Ireland’s abortion ban have suggested that she may have died from the delayed administration of antibiotics, and not, strictly speaking, for lack of an abortion. (Which… I mean, I’m not that sort of doctor. But this person is, and she says that the standard of care is “hastening delivery by the safest…
Read More…on Twitter last weekend? It was #ldsconf: the hashtag for the Church’s semi-annual General Conference. When I was a kid, Conference was broadcast global by satellite. Now, we get it on-line, simulcast in dozens of languages from Apache to Arabic to Tongan. And thousands worldwide follow and run their own live commentaries on blogs and Twitter. During last Sunday morning General Conference Session, LDS First Presidency member Dieter F. Uchtdorf…
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…ve simple melodies, but place layers of sounds upon one another like an aural palimpsest. The guitarist plays his instrument like a cello, with a bow; the keyboardist occasionally plunks out notes on a tiny toy piano; Georg Hólm sometimes uses a drumstick instead of a pick on the strings of his electric bass to bang out a rhythm that sounds like Morse code. When all twelve performers are on stage, the sounds that they make together are nothing les…
Read More…ngeance smear in the history of the internet. Then there’s the “gossip” dismissal. If a case hasn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion, talking about it can always be labelled this way. People who spread gossip are supposed to be venal and petty. It’s a cultural idea with extraordinary power, particularly in religious contexts, although it’s deployed selectively in popular media as well. In The Daily Beast, Robert Weide writes, “I consider myself a…
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…they’re acting as defenders of the faith—and instances where there are actual radical religious groups actively supporting violent attacks. UPDATE: In a new post, Dr. Strenski offers a compelling proposition, that “internet Islam” be considered a new node in an ever-evolving religious landscape—and that this was the faith (or the “dream”) that the Tsernaev brothers believed they were defending. Read the conversation, as it develops, and come back…
Read More…ngs of David Noebel, “I went on to serve on the board of directors with Summit Ministries.” Noebel, the Christian anti-communism crusader who until recently led Summit, teaches that the “Christian worldview” is superior to other “worldviews,” including secular humanism, Islam, and Marxism-Leninism, which are on a coliision course with Christianity. Bachmann, however, did not serve on the board of Summit Ministries, according to its current execut…
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