Religion Dispatches
…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 enter the kingdom of God.” Similarly, the early Christian community is described in Acts 4:34-35 like this: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of…
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…individuals and families spiraling into debt is now being celebrated once again. While last year was the year of reserve and frugality, we are now back where we belong: in the season of spending. While not reviving the post-September 11 rhetoric of shopping as an act of nationalism, we are once again being encouraged to spend—and told that spending is good for us. While disagreeing with this particular logic, I do agree that shopping is an ethica…
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…e Chronicles of Narnia brought a big profit for Walt Disney and Walden Media—around $750 million globally. After a few films, the franchise stalled, though. Rising production costs, declining ticket sales and increasingly mixed reviews led to conflict between the various production companies. There’s currently a legal moratorium preventing a fourth installment. Other major studio efforts haven’t cracked the code for commercial success either: Darr…
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…s a surprise to many observers. It may come as a surprise that, below the radar of most Americans, religion has lost its special status. Sometime in the next few months, the Supreme Court will decide Snyder v. Phelps, an earlier Westboro Baptist Church case involving an anti-gay protest at a military funeral. In Snyder, the family of a deceased service member sued the church for violation of privacy based on a crudely anti-gay protest that church…
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…ebruary, Shaykh Emad refused to see the protests as illegitimate rebellion against a ruler. On the contrary, he considered them a form of calling to good and forbidding the wrong—a Muslim’s duty, according to classical Islamic teachings. A friend of mine was with him in Dar al-Ifta’ a few weeks ago when a caller asked about the legitimacy of firing upon protestors. His response and verdict (fatwa) was unequivocal and yet so characteristically calm…
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…. And yet I was told that not one of us did or said anything to fight back against the ugliness and barbarity of indiscriminate violence. Too many people—not just dentists on Virgin Airlines—make statements like, “Muslims don’t do enough to reject terrorism.” It’s probable many of them have never met Muslims. If they tried, they might be surprised. In fact, the reaction to my essay—you’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I cou…
Read More…riking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fired the most challenging questions at the companies’ lawyer, Paul Clement, confronting the essential underpinnings of his clients’ claims. In particular, they questioned whether RFRA was intended to cover corporations, whether a party can claim a religious exemption if granting it impacts the rights of others (in this case, the companies’ em…
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…ue wasn’t the kind of thing that we could call a “motherfucker.” It was incapable of the act—too abstract to be blamed or cursed. Recent findings in cognitive psychology indicate that we blame at an individual level, using mental systems adapted for life in small groups. It is psychologically difficult to blame large, abstract entities—like government agencies or corporations—in a meaningful or satisfactory way. Ideologies and conspiracy theories…
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…ired from Fuller and moved to Colorado Springs! I felt like I worked at a catalog call-in center. Seriously. I would never have expected to be talking about Wagner in conjunction with the 2012 election cycle, but here goes: C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran Professor of Church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary when I was there as a student in the early 1990s. He had had a career on the mission field in South America before coming to Full…
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…this week, and in the wake of a terrorist attack in Brussels, President Obama sat in a Havana stadium extolling the sacred power of baseball to a trio of ESPN commentators: I did not play a lot of baseball as a kid; I was more of a basketball player, but there is something about baseball that is so fundamentally woven into our culture. And in some ways, at a time in our lives where everything is a mile a minute and kids are on their phone all the…
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