Religion Dispatches
…e about the mid-twentieth century United States and the spiritual seeking that develops out of the postwar period. What we get is a mixture of mid-century psychoanalysis, a new emphasis on data collection and mining, and a tip of the hat to the scientific method, no matter how far from rigorous that might be. “The Master” himself is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who uncovers stories from the individual’s past, via hypnotic suggestion, a…
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…ume that reads like Vatican officials wrote it. Perhaps they did. Although what is more disturbing is that the Vatican has set women up against one another. Conservative women religious collaborated on the Apostolic Visitation and will be appointed to the Archbishop Delegate’s Advisory Team. The effort to rein in LCWR is meant as much to scare the rest of us into line as to corral the nuns. I can say with confidence that it won’t work. Roman Catholi…
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…within evangelicalism, like the prominent Texas Republican, David Barton, promote the idea that America is slouching toward Gomorrah. America is God’s chosen republic, Barton asserts: the nation has been an explicitly Christian country from its earliest days and needs to reverse its sinful migration away from its biblical roots. Professional historians, by contrast (including leading evangelicals like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden)…
Read More…o I made my way out and retraced my steps back to my spot. Well, at least that is what I needed to do—but this is where those instructions on how to keep yourself sane would have been useful. Try to place yourself somewhere and note with markers where you are so you can retrace your steps. The mosque is gigantic, full of beautiful and elaborate designs, with an immense number of repetitions to them. The stairs and the escalators are deceiving, tak…
Read More…of who we are who we love, we want to try our hand at institutions that are brand new to us. There may be a day when church leadership and membership, as well as marriage, is old hat to us. Until then, we will relish our new found freedoms, even as we remember the pioneers who gave their lives to make it possible….
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…en, in the context of idolatry or lewdness—and only in those contexts. 2. That whatever the prohibition is, it’s central to religion. It isn’t. The “sin” in Leviticus is the same as eating a shrimp cocktail. Jesus never mentions homosexuality at all. It’s not in the ten commandments. It’s marginal, and of marginal concern. 3. That the “sin of Sodom” is homosexuality. It isn’t. It’s greed, cruelty, and inhospitality (Ezekiel 16:49-50, Jeremiah 23:1…
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…operly as he had saved as much life as was possible. Fr. Haring asked: by what thinking could the fetus have such a right to life that it could kill both itself and the woman by exercising it? Such rights, he said, do not exist. Alicja Tysiac, in 2000, was advised that her pregnancy, if it went to term, would cause blindness. She was forbidden to abort and lost nearly all her eyesight. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in her favor saying s…
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…about religion, memory, and children’s literature became my way of doing that. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? From 1945 to the present, Jewish and African Americans were grafted into greater American civic acceptance through their children’s stories—especially those stories with overtones of suffering, exodus, and sacrifice—in modes that have long been part of the grand narratives of American religious history. I don’t s…
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…veral times. I thought all Christians did that sort of thing. Finding out that I was wrong about that, including the fact that there were Christians who supported capital punishment [see related blog post: “Does Religion Justify the Murder of Troy Davis?” —ed.], prompted all sorts of questions for me. Second, the historic jail in downtown Pittsburgh. On a tour of the facility, I was told that the jail was modeled on earlier Pennsylvania penal inst…
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…s piece in the NY Times, “The Changing Face of the Burning Man Festival,” that ran on Burning Man’s opening day. It turns out that the Burning Man organization will be shifting from a for-profit company to a nonprofit. How much will the payout be to the six owners? Burners want to know. Those who gripe about the degeneration of Burning Man into a consumer event could add this sale to a long list of complaints: rules and more rules, opaque finances…
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