Religion Dispatches
…of the Madonna of the Bikers in Porcaro, France. Christian Scientists want spiritual care covered in the federal health package. A new law in North Carolina requires schools and colleges to give students a minimum of two excused absences for religious observances. “ Rep. Rick Glazier, who co-sponsored the bill, says: “It has to be a bona fide holiday; you don’t get to just take the day off because you want to pray at home.” Here’s hoping the bill…
Read More…larly with DAI if elected. Each one said yes. The Republicans’ decision to skip the forum accomplished two things for themselves. First, it spared them from having to tell constituents to their faces that they will not expand Medicaid or preserve DACA. Second, and more important in the big picture, it preserved the mythology that “religious voters” equal “political conservatives.” Church- and synagogue-goers who favor public spending that benefits…
Read More…se doctors? Because, hey (we’d conclude), in that case maybe we could just skip the whole politician part altogether and just tell doctors and patients to work it out. (Also, wow, you know what I just realized? Legislation that tried to list all the applicable conditions might be longer than three pages, which is a Matter of Dire Consequence on which at least one of your Republican rivals has taken a brave stand. Frankly, I’m tempted to ask you y…
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…; in Turkey, some who refused to change their clothes were executed). In a number of Arab and Muslim states, you can go to the beach, get a drink, skip prayers, and walk around with your hair down. You just can’t expect that your vote will matter. Tonight, in one less country, it seems that may no longer be the case. That government was overbearing, it overreached, and now, it seems to be over. Let us pay less attention to the visibility of their…
Read More…ico also reported that Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, had a “spirited” meeting with seven pro-Israel House Democrats. The AP reports that Rep. Steve Israel, the Democrat who arranged the Dermer meeting, said that “one thing we all agreed on emphatically is that Israel should never be used as a political football.” Although Vice President Joe Biden has not committed to attending the speech, this seems like pressure, not a full-on boyc…
Read More…the same reasons she outlines in a new article explaining her decision to skip this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Parker, a former welfare mother and failed congressional candidate from California who said she “became conservative in church,” writes that “gay is everything conservative is not.” It’s a worldview that is man-centered rather than God-centered. It is a worldview that rejects eternal truths passed on from the…
Read More…t L.A. serves as more than a backdrop. It is a physical manifestation of a spiritual problem plaguing most of the human characters in the film, and Theodore most acutely. This absence of markers of transcendence in the environment contrasts with Samantha’s uncontrollable desire to move beyond what she knows. Unlike a real person, Samantha is able to absorb huge amounts of information almost instantly—which in turn causes the concrete world that fa…
Read More…depth than any other Jesus film. After Jesus and his merry band of friends skip into a junkyard, they take the discarded objects and teach the world how to live just and caring lives. Holey socks become parable-preaching hand puppets. Broken down cars and musical instruments become the vehicles and horns of the gospel story. Forty years before the Occupy Movement would seek to reclaim and redeem urban spaces, the figures in Godspell were doing so…
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…ociety, featuring “radical liberality,” because, even though a significant number of colonists went back to fight the king during the English Civil War (1642-1651), the colonies themselves were more or less left to their own devices during two decades of open warfare and tumultuous Protectorate. In regard to Robinson’s complaint that the transatlantic connection has been routinely overlooked, we need only look to Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins’ Wars,…
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…, a more meditative vision of the way their hair bounces when they run and skip, the way their smiles broaden across their faces in the presence of ice cream, their desires to climb, to explore, to wonder. Among other things it engenders, The Tree of Life magically (and I do not use that term lightly) re-imagines childhood as the nexus between paradise and fall, birth and death, lust and repression, violence and pacifism. And it re-imagines that…
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