Religion Dispatches
…e springing from the grass roots upward. No one breaks down barricades for tickets, abandons cars by the side of the highway, or creates spontaneous parades. Like the other events of the festival circuit (Lollapalooza, Coachella, Austin City Limits), Bonnaroo is a top-down affair staged by skilled, professional producers. In 2007, the festival revenues reportedly topped $17 million, making it the highest-grossing event of its kind in the world. Ye…
Read More…reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my parking tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity.” Gone, too, from Osteen’s theology is any mention of topics that might intrude on happy thoughts: Osteen avoids using current events in his messages so he doesn’t get sidetracked in controversy….
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…in the early nineties for most people consisted largely of acquiring plane tickets, reading relatively static documents, and emailing acquaintances. By 2004, the year before John Paul died, search engines had become sophisticated and powerful, and the immensely popular online world Second Life was in its third year. MySpace had appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was ju…
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…Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton in September, received 10 Public Health Act tickets for organizing various anti-public health rallies in northern Alberta last year and revived her Twitter account, dormant since 2016, specifically in order to promote anti-public health events she organized and ran. But the story of Jericho is nothing to worry about. It’s only about divine massacre. Walls come crumbling down They know what they’re doing. One particip…
Read More…erendum petition were invalid, the petitioners no longer had the requisite number of signatures to place the referendum on the ballot. The subpoenas, served on pastors who are not litigants in the lawsuit, seek a broad range of documents and communications, including sermons, regarding their statements on homosexuality, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), and the petition process. Represented by the religious right legal firm Alliance Defen…
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…nstitutions and spiritual movements need money. I’ve paid for High Holiday tickets, passed the plate at church, and dropped bills into the basket at yoga class. But Osho’s opacity and its denial of the obvious (robes and shampoos, wine and brownies, books and videos were all moneymakers) bothered me. My fuming was worthless. Orientation still started 45 minutes late. My students and I, packed into a classroom with 20 other guests, were led through…
Read More…can’t find any job; among younger males, especially African-Americans, the number is much higher—in many areas one in two workers is without work. Yet Congress, with a Democratic majority, can’t get it together to extend unemployment benefits. Our solons just flew out of town for a weeklong holiday vacation. Republicans, joined by Democratic deficit hawks, insist that any extension be “deficit neutral” and come out of unspent stimulus money. But…
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…he screen, the muted gaping crowd) is the set of a communal inevitability. Tickets pay producers to slaughter others so we may, if possible, evade (for now) our innocent death. What LDS knows, and Sundance doesn’t, is that there’s no reason to press our nose into human filth. The minute we sat down, we were already at Nixzmary’s deathbed. To attend a screening is to attend a sacrifice. In less celebrated contexts, Milan Kundera mutters: “The broth…
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…McCain and his audience, comprised of persons who could afford to buy $500 tickets, would frame a discussion about evil in terms of America versus Islam. McCain’s response contains several problematic assumptions. The first assumption is that America is good. Perhaps my experience as a professor at an HBCU, historically black college or university, has forced me to understand how atrocities against humanity have occurred in a so-called Christian n…
Read More…er skirt. Second, it seems hypocritical: you’ll host a concern for and buy tickets to see a female performer sing songs about things that are totally haram (according to different opinions), but not if she’s wearing clothing you find inappropriate? From the artist’s point of view, it also seems like a seems like an affront. It compromises the artists’ “package deal” of music, image, and stage presence, the latter two of which sometimes include sca…
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