Religion Dispatches
…part, to function as dramatic plays for attention or celebrity status. The Orlando nightclub shooter reportedly checked his phone for news about the shooting during the actual event; the man who murdered hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris last year filmed the attack on a GoPro camera (in that light, the company’s slogan, Be a HERO, seems chilling). It would be wrong to ignore these shooters—their acts have enormous conseque…
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…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…
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…William Derl-Davis, a reverend from the Independent Spiritualist Church in Chicago, and medium Joseph DeLouise exorcise the home of two newlyweds who claimed to be experiencing strange disturbances after moving into their new apartment. The crew were given crosses to wear for protection. DeLouise entered a trance and assumed the persona of an old woman whose spirit could not rest. Derl-Davis administered communion to the spirit and the exorcism wa…
Read More…he American scene at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religion, also held in Chicago. The World’s Parliament may return to the United States, as Dallas has made the list of possible host cities alongside Guadalajara and Brussels. This week’s billboard story: A “My Life, My Death, My Choice, FinalExitNetwork.org” sign in New Jersey has stirred criticism from Catholics and suicide prevention groups. Mainline churches are struggling to maintain their b…
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…at the men requested: My family together My picture with blue sky Downtown Chicago or Lake Florida Beach Marriage Proposal Scene Boy and Girl Playing Piano Solitary confinement is by its very definition a practice meant to be hidden. People locked away, out of sight, in isolation. Hunger strikes, religion, and art have the power to bring such hidden practices to light. At their best, activism, art, and religion share common goals: to make visible…
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…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
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…he gives us his biblical worldview spin: the person who’s right about the number is the person who knows who made the number and for what purpose. Neither person in the meme can know the truth of whether it’s a six or a nine until the author of the meme tells them. In other words, while there might be many worldviews, only God can truly tell us the truth of the world. Thus the only worldview that’s correct is the one that acknowledges God made th…
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…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…
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…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…
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…armed against. War in the name of faith is a recurring theme, as with cell-phone videos of beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dichotomy is spread wide, with ISIS on one end and the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it i…
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