Religion Dispatches
…Back from my Bloggingheads hiatus, I talk with Get Religion’s Mollie Hemingway about whether Mitt Romney’s plan to discuss his Mormonism tonight at the Republican National Convention benefit his candidacy: And we also discussed the significance of the fact that Barack Obama is the only Protestant on both presidential tickets: …
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…nstitutions and spiritual movements need money. I’ve paid for High Holiday tickets, passed the plate at church, and dropped bills into the basket at yoga class. But Osho’s opacity and its denial of the obvious (robes and shampoos, wine and brownies, books and videos were all moneymakers) bothered me. My fuming was worthless. Orientation still started 45 minutes late. My students and I, packed into a classroom with 20 other guests, were led through…
Read More…osophy of history, leaves no other way to understand it—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Huckabee seems to be selling tickets on the Titanic….
Read More…reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my parking tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity.” Gone, too, from Osteen’s theology is any mention of topics that might intrude on happy thoughts: Osteen avoids using current events in his messages so he doesn’t get sidetracked in controversy….
Read More…ilt to scale, there will also be a replica of the Tower of Babel, a walled city similar to ancient times, live animal shows and a children’s play area and a 1st Century Medieval Village. There will be no roller coasters or other thrill rides. AIG’s partner in the theme park project, Ark Encounter LLC, is a for-profit business based in Missouri. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear attended the press conference, praising the project for the boost he says it…
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…lerk to get back my ID card and the ultimate prize: a plastic block with a number on it. I was then permitted to sit in a chair—but not look at any manuscripts, yet. Juste sat down beside me. “What you will see here,” he whispered, “is the earliest Latin manuscript to contain Arabic words. The earliest proof of the transmission of Arabic science to the West. Now I will order the manuscript.” He filled out a form and took it to another desk. Te…
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…he Untouchables), which came out almost a year ago and sold twenty million tickets in France (and nearly as many abroad). Intouchables is a funny and moving comedy, but as politically correct a story as you’ll find: a black young man bordering on delinquency is hired by a tetraplegic wealthy man to be his assistant-nurse-chauffeur. They have a ball together doing crazy—and sometimes nasty—things, and save each other from an apparently inexorable f…
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…ents, booked an on-campus venue, and began to advertise the event and sell tickets. Then, 11 days before the drag fundraiser was set to take place, WT President Walter Wendler, who has a record of inserting his right-wing Christian bias into his public roles, unilaterally canceled the performance via a pedantic email. Seidel tells the story of the drag show cancelation at West Texas A&M (clip=5.5 minutes): Much of the moralizing communique was cou…
Read More…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…
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…their psyches as inaccessible markers of meaning and status, than they are tickets to a Premier League match. A Spiritual War? This, at least, is the gist of much of the heated banter on the uprisings on the Facebook fan page of trip hop duo Massive Attack, where one fan drew something of a spiritual assessment from the film Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the m…
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