Religion Dispatches
…Earth who are anonymous (even to themselves) and link humanity to God. His new book is Virtual Words, just out from Oxford University Press, evolved from his Jargon Watch column in Wired. Though he’s received some blessing from the scientific world—a geneticist at UC Berkeley, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and other notables were on the board of Keats’ International Association for Divine Taxonomy—his work more often gets called absu…
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…nd other distributed locales, but praying together for the miners, sharing news from their parts of the world, and, in general, witnessing and ministering to one another throughout the day. It’s hard to tell where all this might lead. Predictably, alas, few religious leaders seemed to participate in the event. Father David Pauvif, a Roman Catholic priest who ministered to the miners and their families throughout the ordeal, was swarmed by reporter…
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…led with a persistent sense that only a select few are able to handle the truth of the world as it is. To embrace Preib’s realism, then, “You just have to be tough enough to ride it out.” Preib is, to borrow his description of Whitman, “a tough motherfucker.” His prose has the blunt gait of an incident report, yet deeply measured, contemplative, each clean sentence clearly the work of lengthy reflection. His interest is not just in the facts, afte…
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…e in a world formed in the wake of violence and death. Yet the son’s final words to his father express his desire to leave his father’s world of predator creatures, to which his father says, “me too.” While it’s not possible to leave our world of predator creatures, what can be left behind is the fear that draws the predator creature out of us and sends it marauding through black and Hispanic communities. What must be left behind is a form of poli…
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…ch to bear, and a group of Liberty University students released a strongly worded statement distancing themselves from Falwell and Trump: We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history. Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him… Because our president has led the world to believe…
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…consider if genetic modification will reduce or increase suffering in the world, or dukkha. If the world becomes sick, so will we. It is therefore imperative to avoid creating additional harm in anything we do. Genetic modification is not necessarily harmful, but in order for healthful products to have their intended benefits, it is important that producing them is carried out within healthful social, economic, and ecological frameworks. In an es…
Read More…evaporated. It’s now a country of 109 acres, roughly an eighth the size of New York’s Central Park, with a population of about 600, many of whom are posted abroad. Did someone cast a spell? Was there a natural disaster that I missed in the news? No, the Holy See signed some United Nations’ treaties and now, when confronted with abiding by them, is scrambling for legal cover. The gentlemen are claiming that they meant for the treaties to apply to t…
Read More…iced by James Buchan in his extraordinary 1997 book, Frozen Desire: In the new world, first, there is no such thing as Providence, merely probability, which can be studied at the gaming table. Second, there is such a thing as usury: whatever Aristotle and the Gospels say, money is productive of more money, it does breed, and on Sunday, too… Third, the Church is quite wrong and human beings are all more or less alike. Reality is thus reconfigured o…
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…o Arab lesbians Hind al Nu’man and al-Zarqa by writing: “Oh Hind, you are truer to your word than men. Oh, the differences between your loyalty and theirs.” But it wasn’t just poets who valorized queer love and gender nonconformity, it was Muslim rulers themselves. The Abbasid Caliph al-Amin wrote passionate verses for his lover, Kawthar, who was famously either gender nonconforming or intersex. According to Sahar Amer, the queen mother, Zubayda,…
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…words. He was a writer-in-residence at a small women’s college in upstate New York. Boo Boo was a married mother of three, and the twins, Walt and Walker were, respectively, an accidental casualty of the occupation of Japan and a Jesuit priest working in South America. Zooey (Zachary Martin Glass) was an aspiring actor in 1955, and the youngest daughter, Franny, was on leave from her college due to a spiritual malaise that brought her to the brin…
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