Search Results for:

Delta Airlines 1800-299-7264 Book A Flight Phone Number

Along Came a Spider: What the Pope Doesn’t See

…n while he watched. If you think this is a script from a porn movie, think again: this is the latest escapade from the Archdiocese of Miami, encapsulated in the headline from the Miami Herald “Ex-Stripper: Priest is my baby’s father—and I want him to pay.” Before I go south and start to write this whole piece with quotes from songs (“That’s Just My Baby Daddy” comes to mind) I am struck with disgust about where the Catholic church, and lately Miam…

Read More

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

What inspired you to write Ecce Homo? As part of a completely separate research project, I stumbled across Wilson Yates’ article on the religious significance of Francis Bacon’s paintings which led me to a reproduction of Bacon’s Painting (1946), which led me to catalogues of Bacon’s work. I was absolutely enraptured by their difficult beauty. I was curious about my reaction to them, about why I was so taken by these paintings when many friends h…

Read More

With the Pope at Ground Zero

…e Francis went for an walk alongside the north pool of the 9/11 Memorial Plaza to meet with ten families who lost loved ones at the twin towers and to participate in an interfaith service with over 600 religious leaders from the New York area. We have come a long way from 2001, but the hurt and pain remained in the faces of many present, including Tim Rogér of Rochester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines

Read More

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

…evelation, for example—as metaphorical. Thus, the Qur’an promises that in Paradise, there will be gardens, running water, and ripe fruits. The righteous will be clad in silk and recline on couches, ready to be waited on and to receive the attention of houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to t…

Read More

Does Religion Still Matter?

…t 7pm—Central time—I’ll be joining a panel at Marquette University’s Islam Awareness Week. (This is an occasion during which Muslim students attempt to draw one’s awareness to parts of Islam one is unaware of. It’s like getting to know the neighbor you might not wish you had.) The topic for the panel is ‘Does Religion Still Matter?’ (Cramer 004E, if that means anything to you.) Before I tell you how I decided to answer, let me describe some other…

Read More

Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…Your Fault, a series on blame in contemporary society by RD’s The Cubit.   AA: Is it fair to say that the psychological mechanisms we use for blaming are tuned for judging human individuals? BM: Yes. Because that’s the only place, and the only context, in which we can actually learn this. The way my research group has thought for a while about how blame emerges developmentally and gets refined in the course of growing up in a community, is really…

Read More

Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

…chedule interviews. I don’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion t…

Read More

The “Southern Cage”: How the Myth of the Redemptive Depression Keeps Blacks at the Margins

…e test in especially brutal fashion. The lessons learned—and the myths propagated—are the subject of a fascinating new study. Alison Collis Greene is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Mississippi State University. Her book, No Depression in Heaven: the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta, tells a story of faith, famine, and the fight for survival in the Great Depression South. RD’s Eric…

Read More

Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

…tside Episcopal churches—they experience them within Episcopal churches at alarmingly high rates, too. And the denomination’s structures (canon law included) have consistently failed to protect them. New data reveals the scope of the abuse crisis Buried deep in the Reports to the General Convention are the results of a survey, conducted in 2020, that quantifies the violence epidemic. Based on a similar survey conducted in 2017 amongst United Metho…

Read More

Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

…ork for you. The article literally discusses someone getting Third-World peasants to loan her a cell in a pinch. You don’t get much more entitled than that. Still, there is something to be said for the virtues of unhooking from technology. I sometimes wonder if the convenience of having a cell is worthwhile, given that one of its most common uses is to find out where my wife got to in Kohl’s. But it seems to me that focusing on the micro-trend of…

Read More