Religion Dispatches
…on a national level of what is happening and who is responsible. Whether the first anniversary of Jan 6 will bring further violence is unknown, but what is knowable is that without accountability, there will be no peace….
Read More…tures called “lesbians.” I put the magazine down and said to myself, “So, that’s what I am.” I went to the mirror and tried on my new label. “I am a lezzz-be-yun,” I pronounced the new noun slowly, trying to wrap both my tongue and my mind around this strange word. I hated it. I still hate it. The word lesbian is so … clinical … bloodless … weak. To this day, if I feel I need a label for my sexuality, I still prefer “dyke” for its short, punchy a…
Read More…d mine—at the loss of The Colbert Report is coupled with bitter knowledge that we are now left to for ourselves with Jesus-hating communists who control the media—you know who you are! While The Colbert Report has moved on to its heavenly reward, the show will live on through followers in the Colbert Nation, the memory of patriotic “truthiness,” (and in Comedy Central marathons). In lieu of flowers, please send money to Stephen Colbert’s Super Pac…
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…n can be motivated as much by fear as by a sense of privilege—the feeling that what applies to my child is, somehow, different from what applies to everyone else’s. There’s a logic to this idea that’s deeply appealing (particularly, Biss argues, for the educated, wealthier parents who form one of the key anti-vaxxer demographics). The heroes of our fictions are defined by their exceptional characteristics, and by their exceptional invulnerability….
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…more than a generation (somewhere between 70 and 110 CE). All this to say that figuring out “what the Bible says” on any given topic is difficult and sometimes well-nigh impossible. Taking the Bible seriously means first taking its own history seriously, and then taking what it says seriously enough to admit the density and opacity of some of its pronouncements. “Mystery” is a word that appears with some regularity in many biblical books. In addit…
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…ngly having pastoral care moments where anger is the predominant emotion. What we discovered is that there were no theological or ecclesiastical resources to deal with anger in terms of righteous indignation; to deal with a wrong that one felt the need to right.* Part of our frustration wasn’t just fueled by the actual events themselves, but by the ways in which we felt part of generation that was in-between; caught in the middle of traditions tha…
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…ism as these grave threats to the family. He would dismiss domestic abuse—that’s something that appears in later of his books. He would sometimes accuse women of faking it, just to get attention, that sort of thing. Even where he believed abuse was real, he never really thought of it as a good reason for divorce. Everybody had to stay in their marriage. And when he, when he ended up founding Focus on the Family he really gave all of those ideas th…
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…equitable balance; that would be grotesque,” he writes. “But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at that down there. Look at that.” Wimbledon that year was a religious experience, Wallace says, a kind of grace, an experience of another, better world. And the thing about grace is that it’s inherently good; it’s never inappropriate, even when it sp…
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…had similar results. But what about the mainline Protestants? Yeah, about that. For every 100 churches that responded to white-sounding names, only 89 responded to black names. 86 responded to Latina/o names. And an abysmal 72 responded to Asian names. Also, mainliners’ replies to non-white-sounding names tended to be terser and less inviting than our replies to white-sounding names. My people, listen. There is no sense in which this is okay. Ther…
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…e Union board members considered him a “crazy bigot” who made the tin foil hat charge that the board had been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. At the conference, a Center for Security Policy employee handed out a flyer that described shari’ah as “a supremacist program that justifies the destruction of Christian churches and parishioners” and “the replacement of our constitutional republic. . . .with a theocratic Islamic caliphate governing a…
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