Religion Dispatches
…t”: that was the ritual key in Seoul. The Koreans boldly choreographed any number of events that lent themselves to Orientalizing stereotypes, but then, as I say, doubled back on themselves to show how very fluent they were in western forms of ritual representation as well. These Opening ceremonies have been clearly invoked many times since — in Barcelona, in Atlanta, and even in Sydney, where gestures to indigenous ritual form took center stage….
Read More…mprehensive features on the list as did the BBC, the Times Online, and the Sydney Morning Herald, to name a few. Okay, the Vatican condemning sinful behavior is not a news flash, but the frame it provides—specifically, engaging the contemporary world in a collective reconsideration of systemic and personal sin—is noteworthy. We forgive our peccadilloes all too easily, which is why the Vatican wants a wholesale return to confession. It’s early in t…
Read More…the seventh World Congress of Families conference, which is scheduled for Sydney, Australia in May. The letter telling Smith he was no longer welcome says the bill he supported “is at odds with the World Congress of Families’ definition of the natural family, marriage, and a child’s right to be raised by its mother and father.” The World Congress of Families is one vehicle by which American religious conservatives export their anti-abortion and a…
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…e Somalia’s transitional government.) Then there are the recent arrests in Sydney, Australia of Somali youth conspiring to storm an army base and kill soldiers indiscriminately. And this is not just about recent immigrants from third world countries. Reza Taheri-azar, a philosophy and psychology major at the University of North Carolina, and a longtime resident of the United States, struck nine people with his sport utility vehicle at a pedestrian…
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…s from the vantage of 1980, Yale University historian of American religion Sydney Ahlstrom considered the revolutionary developments in religion and ethics. “Never before in the country’s history,” he recalled, had “so many Americans expressed revolutionary intentions and actively participated in efforts to alter the shape of American civilization in almost every imaginable aspect—from diet to diplomacy from art to the economic disorder.” Hargis w…
Read More…olitik ideological positions or to pursue justice through the evolution of international law. The maturity of the Egyptian revolution points to a possible maturing of what it means to be “political.” For many Muslims, Islam does not mean conflict; it means submission, to truth and to peace. The unleashing of towering new political energies in the Muslim world present an opportunity for Muslims to hold fast to their highest ideals and for non-Mus…
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…rty Law Center as a hate group) are affiliated with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, when Robert Jeffress is the poisonous voice sanctifying the American embassy’s relocation in Israel, when the Vice President of the United States understands Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card used to freely exercise open bigotry, it can seem pretty conclusive that power has prevailed over justice. But consider some other words of…
Read More…rty Law Center as a hate group) are affiliated with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, when Robert Jeffress is the poisonous voice sanctifying the American embassy’s relocation in Israel, when the Vice President of the United States understands Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card used to freely exercise open bigotry, it can seem pretty conclusive that power has prevailed over justice. But consider some other words of…
Read More…ase of ACSI v. Stearns. In Aug. 2005, the Association of Christian Schools International, the Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, Calif., along with some of its students, filed suit against the University of California, basically arguing that students from its private Christian high schools were being discriminated because the university system, in its review of applicants, did not give college preparatory credit for some of their courses…
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…ritical of what one vicar termed the “false hopes” being delivered by this international crusade team. CfAN claims to take the Gospel into some of the world’s most remote and dangerous places, and Gulu town does not fail in that regard. As Kolenda wrote in a blog post on Day One of the crusade: “Mass graves, child soldiers, mutilations, rape, murder, and genocide are words that come to mind when one thinks of this place.” There was a corresponding…
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