Religion Dispatches
…ectorial nod from the Celestial Auteur. Absent from Audience of One is the central text. There are no scenes from Gazowsky’s epic Gravity, no summary of its plot. We get only broad outlines of what the divinely inspired film will be about: It will be set in the future, a future much like the biblical past. It will be “Star Wars meets the Ten Commandments.” We see glimpses of sets, medieval-looking costumes, sketches of strange creatures, and fragm…
Read More…since persecution is a potent rhetorical resource, and since it is also a central theme of the Christian tradition, Christian complaints about systematic marginalization tend to blend quite seamlessly into a broader narrative of persecution. As a practical matter, I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins. For Dreher, then, the explicit disavowal of the word “persecution” may be insufficient to overcome the impression of it in his writing,…
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…t column, Jamelle Bouie, writing with incandescent clarity, emphasizes the centrality of human dignity to the democratic vision of Frederick Douglass. However its ubiquity within the Catechism of the Catholic Church and in Humanae Dignitatis, the 1965 papal encyclical establishing religious freedom as the preeminent human right, confirms that “human dignity” possesses uniquely incantatory and “self-evident” meaning for conservative Catholics. In m…
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…g area of Obama’s website, one of the email messages asked: “Why would the Republicans spend a whole night of their convention attacking ordinary people? With the nation watching, the Republicans mocked, dismissed, and actually laughed out loud at Americans who engage in community service and organizing.” This particular line of attack also seems to be galvanizing community organizers themselves to speak out in vigorous defense of their work. In s…
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