Religion Dispatches
…stribution of wealth are not in the gospel. It’s simply not true. Luke 1:52-53 describes Jesus’ mother, Mary, anticipating his birth with these words: “He [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” This same Jesus tells us in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to e…
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…pologized: they couldn’t facilitate bribery. We would have to buy new, full-price tickets to Iran. On the phone with JetBlue’s customer service line that night, my righteous fury dissipated quickly. Could JetBlue really be to blame for bad weather, or a mechanical problem, or whatever system error had made our flight impossible? Don’t I benefit regularly from this massive travel infrastructure that, like Lady Justice, doles its punishments out bli…
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…r discredited as false—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Ma…
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…e tell me I should smile more). It is a lazy weekday morning in the Raleigh-Durham Airport and I am returning from a business trip I didn’t really want to take. I am dressed in business casual. I’m about as threatening as your average Gund creation. Having a total stranger employed by the government narrate just how he’s going to touch you is strangely erotic in a nation so squeamish about frank discussions of sexuality; especially involving same-…
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…free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer service agent or the person at the desk, who sat there, right when the doors were clo…
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…spiracy theory. Viganò has promoted it relentlessly. It’s also used by anti-vaxx, anti-mask and other anti-mandate groups as their way of drumming up support internationally and bringing in more conspiracy theorists. Viganò’s message focuses on Christian nationalism from a Catholic perspective. It’s also permeated with QAnon tropes: “But, even more, dear Canadian brothers, it is necessary to understand that this dystopia serves to establish the di…
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…that is at its core anti-materialist. I am also not one to embrace an anti-body, anti-aesthetic vision of the human that demonizes the body. And yet, as I understand it, Christianity teaches us to value relationships over objects and embrace a communal vision of the human community over individualism. This is fundamental, for example, to the Catholic Social tradition, where the common good is foundational, as is the dignity of the human person. A…
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…ting it didn’t deserve to even be called a Christian movie. This was a “run-of-the-mill disaster flick” with little to no connection to faith or the theology the story is supposed to dramatize. The magazine got noticeable pushback from readers whose objections were loud enough the magazine’s film review editor, Alissa Wilkinson, responded. She ended up arguing that, at the very least, Christians aren’t bad Christians if they want their movies to h…
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…to throttle that judgmental monster of my mind, to tell him to take a life-long time-out in the corner, euthanize him or expel him, deport or detain him—anything to give me some peace. I’d had enough of the questions, the doubts, the self-incrimination, the endless feelings of unworthiness, the inability to find myself in the desperate hatred of myself for my own weakness. I was sick of asking which of these feelings were legitimate and which ill…
Read More…about whether such an arrangement would satisfy his clients, but he was non-committal. (Religious non-profits have also brought RFRA claims against the accommodation.) The argument wasn’t over, though, without a kosher butcher analogy. This one was raised by Justice Samuel Alito, who pointed to a Danish effort that would close kosher and halal slaugherhouses through a law that would ban killing an animal without stunning it first. Verrilli describ…
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