Religion Dispatches
…prayers and certainly not because he expects to receive any transcendent “truth” inside of a church. He writes, “Liturgy is about providing a silent space inside me where words are replaced by an experience of another dimension where I may sense the love of God.” And again, “Church is one of the places I may offer my grandchildren a vision of life that is about more than status, stuff, education, and money.” And still again, “If there were no spir…
Read More…e sine qua non in legends of the black mass, could occur. Host desecration stories have a long history going back to the Middle Ages when Jews, rather than Satanists, were accused of infiltrating communion and palming the host to use in obscene rituals. Scalia waspromoting host desecration stories on Patheos years before the Satanic Temple was founded, but the announced black mass offered the tantalizing hope of a documented case that would confir…
Read More…religion. And it certainly is not “everything.” In her recent book, Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life (Oxford, 2014), Ammerman lays out exactly this kind of map. It turns out when Americans talk about “spirituality” they refer to religious traditions, to morality and living a virtuous life. At times they link the term to God or the spiritual world. At other times it refers to particular practices and rituals, to m…
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…t. Even the construction of “Muslim rage”—what is the purpose of that construction? We know: it’s to construct Muslims as inherently angry and rageful with no explanation for their anger. And because we cannot find a reason, the only solution or intervention is brute force. “The U.S. continues to insist on a mythical narrative about what kind of country this is: that it inflicts violence for good reasons.” You wrote the book twenty years into the…
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…scuss here at The Cubit. Without further ado, here are the top three short stories for anyone jonesing for more Weir: Bored World. The story of a mischievous, trans-dimensional plane of existence. Is this a god, or the story of sci-fi itself? Antihypoxiant. Here at The Cubit we’ve been tracking shifts in our cultural attitudes towards health, diet, and medicine. In “Antihypoxiant,” Weir pushes a fictional scientist to the limit of a certain kind o…
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…and their neighbors made a break for freedom. They piled into the back of trucks and with the lights out drove madly through checkpoints and down the road towards Iraq and Kurdistan. The pharmacist showed me a video he had made with his cell phone, which did indeed look like a cattle surge of vehicles illumined by a few eerie lights. Now the news from his town is “very bad”—there is no water or electricity or food in stores. Christians are forced…
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…children. Make no mistake, the Roman Catholic Church has been hiding a corrupt, morally bankrupt organizational structure that values position over the protection of children and adults damaged by abusive clerics. It is not just the parish or school perpetrators who are at fault, but a hierarchical system that relies on outmoded organizational fealty and structure that deems the harmed to be harmful to the Church. Sex may be the issue, but the bi…
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…e been willing to take notice of increased Christian involvement in that struggle, no news report or news analysis that I have seen to date has bothered to look at the underlying and growing Christian theological challenge to our punishment-only incarceration system. Similarly, no reporter or analyst that I know of has dug into the radically different visions of what Christianity is about between the gun rights people and the stop-gun-violence mov…
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…imate truth” moment, in fact Serial warns us against our hunger for final truths because this is what rushed Adnan to jail in the first place. (Once again, this was a failure of the justice system whether he’s guilty or innocent.) Finally, I want to bring up a common critique of Serial: that Sarah Koenig and company were insufficiently attentive to various social issues, including religion and ethnicity. As an Iranian-American who was also a Musli…
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…enerally choose the good. Playing as a Sith, one is seemingly destined to cruelty, but many players resist behaving in such a way. Our survey, which was administered online and advertised in SWTOR forums, engaged three quest lines in which the players can harm innocents. In two out of the three quests, players indicated an overwhelming preference for “good” behavior, but the role-play of the third created more ambiguity. Despite the Daily Mail’s c…
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