Religion Dispatches
…But, with all due respect to Ecclesiastes, digital technology is something new under the sun. Laws about stealing, and lying, and loving one’s neighbor aren’t so easy to apply to issues of global connectedness and digital privacy. Back in June, writing about the NSA surveillance scandal, Daniel Schultz pointed out in Christian Century that: there has been minimal reaction by religious groups. A quick survey of eight denominations found that only o…
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…w Torba. The Tree of Life Synagogue shooter was, not coincidentally, a Gab user. Under pressure, Mastriano eventually cut ties with Gab, but as a Christian nationalist gubernatorial candidate, he remains a threat to democracy. The point in adducing these examples and tracing their connections is not that most individual evangelical churches have direct ties to groups like the Proud Boys or that they provide direct support for prominent state or na…
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…Christian by birth. But it is just this kind of complexity that Republican promoters of anti-Arab bias seek to simplify. As shocked as many Americans were to learn of Khalidi’s scapegoating, the Republicans’ choice could not have been more perfect. Not because the professor heads up a research center at Columbia that has been the target of criticism by conservative education activists, anxious about how Middle Eastern studies is taught in the Unit…
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…l of a portrait of Reinhold Niebuhr, 1948, by Ernest Hamlin Baker, Gouache on board, from the National Portrait Gallery. Photo is by flickr user cliff1066, used under a Creative Commons license….
Read More…d: New Constitution to Recognize Third Gender Naith Payton reports at Pink News that Thailand’s new constitution will include references to a third gender: A spokesman for the panel which is drafting the new constitution, Kamnoon Sittisamarn, said this was to ensure all sexual identities would be protected and treated equally under the law. He told Reuters: “We are putting the words ‘third gender’ in the constitution because Thai society has advan…
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…a chaotic system. For businesses tied to the weather-closing status of the New York City Public Schools, there’s yet another ethical element. During one of New York’s worst storms—last year—Mayor de Blasio kept the schools open in horrendous travel conditions. One of the reasons given? Many children get their only hot meal of the day at school. We have to force kids to school so they can eat a square meal? And Zuccotti Park was cleared out years a…
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…this question was only posed directly to the Jewish candidates, as Twitter user @JillSteinberg3 pointed out: “Apparently the question was directed only at the Jews on the stage. So very bizarre. My heart sunk.” It was good to see Sanders and Warren both argue for the U.S.’s traditional foreign policy goal of a two-state solution, which the Trump administration has done so much to undermine, and Sanders’ willingness to state outright that Israeli P…
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…. Still, I come. But this year, unlike other years (that year when, hope renewed for a time, I wrote a book celebrating what courageous women were doing to change this punishing, patriarchal church), this year, my faith is gone. I can see a time when this awesome church will be an awesome museum, a monument to beliefs long discredited, as alien to future human beings as the gods of Greek mythology are to us. But this journey, this way of the cross…
Read More…because nothing like that took place in American history. Still, the Daily News’ Jaime Uribarri drags Smith through the mud by recounting the cruelty of online critics: “You’re a f——— idiot” was one of the the more blunt responses to the head-scratcher of a post, while others, like Twitter user @j_weech1, tried enlightening Smith about the true meaning of the term. “It’s called Black Friday because businesses get into the black (profit) for the ye…
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…ged like a pinball machine’s top-ten list. The service requires that every user play both Sinner and Saint, and a novice is granted five bits of each one’s currency: Five Horns for confessing, and five Halos for granting penances. One of each is “gifted… every Sabbath day” but for zealots and louts more credits can be purchased for 17¢ apiece. As with fancy chemical aids for our Facebook farms, this money goes straight to the developers. The users…
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