Religion Dispatches
…–state, the racialization of peoples, and the resulting struggle to forge spaces of freedom and autonomy, often through the creation or preservation of religious customs and institutions. Consequently, religious freedom, democracy, and republicanism fostered religiously-based repression. Perhaps it is inevitable that a documentary reliant on a scholarly dominant narrative, and beholden by its very mission to speak to—and not alienate—a substantial…
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…a, however, Chuck Norris and Franklin Graham have to stand in the stead of Patrick Henry or Parson Weems. Thus, for the anti-Obama agonists, the president’s overtly Christian testifying, praying with Billy Graham, championing of C. S. Lewis, and quoting of the Old Testament in major public speeches simply shield the fact that the enemy always comes clothed in righteousness—and that the Great Deceiver is among us. David Barton summarizes it most su…
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…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 by combining just a few digits. But since I’m a minimalist, I’d be quite content with a randomly ordered list. I’m confident that such a…
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…any 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, and the po…
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…it days or weeks to communicate by exchange of letter or telegram. The telephone promised a pathway out of our isolation and loneliness. In 1926, Arthur Pound sung its praises: “We who are still young have beheld millions of farm families emerge from isolation, the tucked away mountain hamlet and prairie village brought into touch with the busy currents of trade and social intercourse. Many new tools and systems originated by science and organized…
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…ggard’s new anti-authority message merged with his patented soft-sell evangelical vibe can spark a rebellion against the old guard. But like Paul, Pastor Ted does not see himself as a quiet exile….
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…kaw on Meet the Press, General Powell spoke of his disappointment with the Republican Party and their ‘allegations’ that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. He went on to say: …the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old…
Read More…opt and subsequently raise children. Schools shall not require children to participate in education in the area of sexual behavior or euthanasia if their parents or the children themselves do not agree with it. The fourth question “Decent people have fallen prey to the system as the ÚS (the Slovak constitutional court) has forbidden them to voice their view of what the family is.” was removed by the ÚS (the Slovak constitutional court). Voters who…
Read More…using the tried and true American pedagogical method of getting people to participate by (hopefully, and hopefully with respect) getting them to disagree on something. But I also wanted them to know what was going on in the wider world on this issue. I wasn’t surprised that most of my students were against same-sex marriage and that it fell largely to me to lay out the arguments for same-sex marriage. Although there was at least one student in…
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…r sexual practices. If suffering is to be embraced, that embrace must be capacious, these pages insist. Some readers won’t make it past the poem titles—some of which, like certain representations of the crucifixion, run hyperbolic in their attempt to fit a theme: “gnostic bukakki” is a bit much, on purpose. Other readers will find there’s simply too many oral sex references per page, though as U2 showed us some dozen albums ago, an oral fixation d…
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