Religion Dispatches
…ir own theatrics to attend to. Witness the chatter on CNBC, Bloomberg, and CNN over whether putting some transparency into derivatives markets, limiting highly-leveraged bets, etc., would “stifle innovation.” To my knowledge, no one holding forth on this question ever bothered to interrogate that word innovation even a tiny little bit. Last week CNN’s unsavory Ali Velshi brandished the word as a shibboleth and accused morning anchor Tony Harris of…
Read More
…s probably no better illustration of this than Jodi Doering’s interview on CNN this morning. Doering is a nurse in South Dakota. These days, she sees a lot of death. She said nearly all of her small town is now dead from the new coronavirus. She sees patients denying the reality of Covid-19 even as they’re immobile and dying from it. People are still looking for something else, and they want a magic answer, and they won’t want to believe that Covi…
Read More…nounced that he would attend a wedding between two men today. According to CNN, “This is news in 2015 because Rajoy has consistently opposed the recognition of same-sex marriage, which became legal in Spain 10 years ago.” Rajoy had previously said that same-sex couples should be content with civil unions, reports CNN, and that allowing same-sex marriage was a “poke in the eye” to Catholics. Cue accusations of hypocrisy and a debate about loyalty t…
Read More
…uffington Post’s media editor Gabriel Arana reports, a Carson interview on CNN turned “strangely combative” as anchor Alisyn Camerota “pressed him on a number of his recent controversial comments, including the claim that ‘many’ Americans are stupid and that ‘we’d be Cuba if it weren’t for Fox News.‘” Camerota reminds Carson she used to work at Fox News and still has many friends there, but this appears to be of no moment to Carson, who lectures h…
Read More
…anti-abortion. ‘The church is this. God is this.’ Yadda Yadda.” Finally, a CNN story quotes a fellow anti-abortion activist whose assessment of Roeder’s alleged crime revolves around the fact that “[Roeder] was a confessing Christian. He always read his Bible, which wasn’t uncommon. He professed faith in Jesus Christ.” These details about the connection of Mr. Roeder’s violent actions to his Christian faith, however, are glossed over in the Times…
Read MoreCNN: Kent Clark, the CEO of Grace Centers of Hope, a faith-based homeless outreach facility in Pontiac, warmed up the pro-Santorum audience by calling the former Pennsylvania senator “a man who believes in a creator rather than we being the accidental creation of gas and dust.” After Santorum’s rally, Clark told CNN he is supporting Santorum because he is a person of faith who understands that social ills are best cured at the family level and no…
Read More
…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…
Read More
…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…
Read More…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…
Read More
…d. And in response to the controversy and the barrage of outraged parental phone calls, many school systems decided it was safest not to air the speech at all. Others required that alternative activities be arranged for children whose parents refused to permit their kids to be subjected to an encouraging presidential pep talk. The evening after the talk, the local news station I was watching aired a report on the event, complete with footage of a…
Read More