Religion Dispatches
…en fruit bowl, a few artificial flowers, half a bottle of Sprite, and some phone chargers. The two smaller images feature the cluttered interior of a walk-in closet with a bunch of clothes and a faint family portrait on the wireframe shelf, and something that will be familiar to anyone with a newborn child: a rocking seat next to a pink and yellow baby mat. With the caption “A Home Revealed,” the audience is left to make sense of these household p…
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…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…
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…” T-shirts emblazoned with cross-shaped swords. But violence was primarily sanctified through the voices of those who took the stage for two long days. While there’s good reason to worry about the number of high-ranking military officers who used the ReAwaken rally to declare war on their political opponents—while attacking US elections and a free press—it was the voices of civilian preachers like Pastor Burns who delivered the most bellicose spee…
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…ng the traits that made him a 21st-century Hemingway. Omar Ahmed: Mayor of San Carlos; lover of fine cigars; spinner of great yarns; Silicon Valley entrepreneur; passionate aviator; mountain climber; cowboy boot aficionado; leader; visionary; friend. Death did not take him today; instead, we prefer to say that he was just too much for life. He would chide us that we should never speak of “Muslim” and “non-Muslim.” He said, “I prefer ‘neighbor.’”…
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…of them had died—ignoring or denying or simply not understanding that the number of dead was already underreported and already growing. He joked about the effect of this disaster on the budget before posing for a photo op in which he tossed paper towels into a crowd, action he defended in an interview on Trinity Broadcasting Network, a Christian network, reminiscing about the softness and beauty of those paper towels. The catastrophe, after all,…
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…f evangelical Christians with loud speakers gathered in a park in downtown San Pedro Sula, but parade participants “did not realize what they said because we were in our celebration.” … A lack of employment, education and health care and poverty have made many members of San Pedro Sula’s LGBT community susceptible to violence and discrimination. Many of them have chosen to flee the country for Mexico, and ultimately the U.S. “We marched with the e…
Read More…e to teach-and more service. The change began three years ago, when “San Jose leaders proposed that missionaries provide two hours of nonproselytizing community service every day, five days a week—up from the normal four or so hours a week. Missionaries are expected to find their own service opportunities. A website called Justserve, listing organizations in need of volunteers, was created to help them do so. The approach started in Sa…
Read More…ss, and fifteen were reported to be suffering ill effects. In spite of the number of people who experienced difficulties during each of the eight fifteen-minute rounds, Ray contends he did not know that there were problems. In fact, Ray is accused of ignoring the pleas of those who wanted out; in one case an individual went out through the side of the sweat lodge to escape the heat. The prosecution played tapes of Ray before the sweat saying, “It’…
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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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…know how many people have died but the number will probably be in the thousands. The numbers may be low compared to global-scale disasters of recent years, but there is a wrenching poignancy to what is happening in Uttarakhand right now. Many of the forces that frame daily life in South Asia are suddenly on display like a raw wound: the wages of development and globalization, the power of the natural world, divine agency, altruism, self-interest,…
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