Religion Dispatches
…esus Christ and from worshiping Jesus Christ helps the Church [come] out of itself to the outskirts of the existential [limits], that helps Her to be a fruitful Mother.” The full text of Francis’ notes, in English, is available here….
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…is a human invention, dependent on agreement and subject to revision. The truth is that—contra Santorum—a napkin is a napkin only so long as English-speaking people agree to call it that. If they instead decide to call it a “chazzwuzzle,” the napkin’s days will be numbered. If they assign it uses other than mouth-wiping, its legacy will be jeopardized too. And this power is not limited to paper products. If people found that, based on changing con…
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…is source as a “well-known American psychologist” and a “leading American crusader against homosexuality”—and particularly since he said he had come “to thank the Russian people, the State Duma, and President Putin… in the name of the entire Christian world.” To thank them, that is, for their uncompromising stance against same-sex relations which, in Cameron’s fact-free worldview, are destroying Western civilization. On Tuesday, Cameron took part…
Read More…writes: In all three cases, the pattern is the same. There is the eternal Truth that never varies—the will of God, the principles of the Founding Fathers, the so-called laws of the free market. There are the scriptures which explain the eternal truths—the King James Bible, in the case of religious fundamentalism, the Constitution or the Federalist Papers, in the case of constitutional fundamentalism, and Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom i…
Read More…, or that missionaries are allowed to use some of their computer time to research the topics they’re expected to educate others on. We had a saying in my mission in Taiwan: “Missionaries who go to English-speaking missions come home spiritual giants; missionaries who go to Spanish-speaking missions come home fluent; and missionaries who go to Asian-speaking missions just come home.” We never had enough study time. If you didn’t understand a gospel…
Read More…n story. From Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) to Jesus (a Campus Crusade for Christ production from 1979) to Mel Gibson’s 2004 gorefest The Passion, generations of Americans have seen this in film form before. And, while the twitter-storm that grew up (and quickly passed over) about how Satan looked like Obama was a tempest in a teapot, it is entirely true to the genre that Satan must appear as darker-skinned, as Scott Poole (a scholar of…
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…e is one of surrender. We are also khalifah, or agent, representative and trustee. This is our relationship to Allah’s Jamal attributes or her rubbubiyyah. In this, our proper posture is active engagement in all aspects of life. This engagement should manifest our inner states of surrender (this is for all our actions, not just in worship or ibadah, but also in our mu’amalat). There’s a Sufi image of these two postures, like a ball, the top half f…
Read More…eiled in a ceremony on Friday, January 10 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, reports the Jerusalem Post (h/t Bilerico’s John Becker). The new monument will be mounted outside the Municipal LGBT Community Center in Meir Park (Gan Meir) which serves as the city’s main hub of activity for the LGBT community. The monument will be shaped in the form of a pink triangle, reminiscent of the pink triangles LGBT community members were required to attach to their clothes in…
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…mon parlance has us believe that that the Middle Ages were a particularly brutal period). From the French wars of religion, to the English civil wars, to the Thirty Years’ War (where possibly 30% of German civilians perished) the arrival of modernity signaled terror and horror in many corners. How we use words like “medieval,” “reformation,” and “modern” must be exact if we’re to make any sense out of what the Islamic State is, and how we are to d…
Read More…n a Texas college town writes that one mother at the neighborhood pool instructed her children not to play with his Mormon kids. Another woman in Texas remembers that her LDS congregation was banned from participating in a community-wide Christmas event and that non-Church members once barged into Sunday meetings shouting that Mormons were cult members and devil worshippers. A man who grew up in upstate New York remembers being singled out as Morm…
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