Religion Dispatches
…f insincerity after his Super Bowl breakfast speech. Redemption comes at a price—he’s recognized his error, he’s paid the price, he’s learned from his misdeed, and he’s dedicated, in God’s name, to turning his life around. In his complaints about Vick, Peterson criticized others in the spotlight who had “abused Jesus’ name” in order to absolve their transgressions, pointing to the prevalence of embracing a Christian narrative of redemption in the…
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…cast shade upon them, heaping insult upon the injury of reduced subscriber numbers as mobile gaming became all the rage. All the money was micro transactions. But now the metaverse is back with us. The old incarnations linger as the new iterations arrive and take center stage. Once we started imagining the possibility of virtual worlds, our relentless pursuit was predictable. The world we live in is rich and wonderful, but far from perfect. We’ve…
Read More…tically increase the cost and mental anguish of abortions. Congressman Tom Price, Trump’s pick for the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the department that has the most direct impact over women’s health, is also a long-time opponent of reproductive health access. He has received a zero rating from Planned Parenthood and a 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee. He co-sponsored bills in the House that would have d…
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…anumission. Abu Bakr would pay as much as he could, no matter how high the price, spending down his capital, because he believed there were few greater acts to earn merit in God’s eyes. (Compare Abu Bakr’s rules of war, as delivered to his army, to ISIS’ practices. I pronounce the Prophet’s best friend a better interpreter of Islam than poorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently men…
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…d to an extremely high statistic of men looking at pornography. There is a price to be paid for hiding things, for keeping parts of yourself secret. A lot of people in Mormonism lead double lives due to the pressure to tell faith-promoting stories. I think it comes too from the foundations of Mormonism in an open revolt against loss. The ability to do saving rites for the dead was essential to Joseph Smith’s vision. There is no more death-defying…
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…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…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…
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…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…
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…obody can deny the convenience of ready access to information, maps, phone numbers, calendars, and social satisfaction that our reliance on technology provides. Technology is a tool, right? It doesn’t change who we are, right? It doesn’t blind us—it reveals reality by connecting us and showing us the world via our screens… right? Look, I know that our new imaginative, mediated work is doing good. I know people can feel a real sense of empowerment…
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…the country; no one voted for productivity gains that are purchased at the price of extreme overwork and stress; no one voted to give corporate elites a hugely oversized say in what our government is and does. We have wearily accommodated ourselves to these new circumstances, but not happily and with grave reservations about where this is taking us. And now it seems a mainly youthful Occupy movement is giving voice to all of our previously silent…
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