Religion Dispatches
…t is almost invisible outside the academic world because the text is nearly 800 pages of dense, jargon-filled prose.” Rest assured, we do not need to read Taylor for ourselves because David Brooks can be trusted. His ongoing effort to distill for us the density of jargon is a choice well-honed. The result: a column that we have chosen to read (again, wisely) and, moreover, a readerly choice that becomes a sign to others and ourselves that we are a…
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…he Overlook Press, 2008. Kernberg, O F. “A Psychoanalytic Classification of Character Pathology.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 18, no. 4 (October 1970): 800-22. Moreno, J. L. The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method and Spontaneity. Springer Pub Co, 1987….
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…Daschle (D-S.D.) to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. According to Americans United’s Church & State magazine, “The ad place[d] photos of Daschle and Hussein side by side and ask[ed], ‘What do Saddam Hussein and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle have in common?’ It then goes on to assert that both oppose drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.” In the subsequent election, Daschle lost his Senate seat. That was then. Now, alth…
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On a chilly but brilliantly sunlit Friday morning, about two dozen people have gathered along the sidewalk near the main entrance to Central Baptist College in Conway, Arkansas. The group includes a local lesbian couple who have been together for 35 years, a young African-American trans-man who came out of the closet a week before he graduated from another Southern Baptist college in Missouri, and a 22-year-old aspiring minister from Philadelphia…
Read More…ow what they are doing or understand where this new tidal wave of cash will actually go. So, flow the money will, anywhere between 600 and 800 billion dollars worth… but where will it go?…
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…rd. I had foundation funding to send a copy to each diocesan bishop in the United States, and every bishop in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa has received the offer of a download. Each member of the Council of Cardinals, its secretary, and Pope Francis has received a copy, along with the original Italian-languages essays. If the hierarchy will consider what history really says, perhaps they will think about whe…
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…the intellectual source code of religious and cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation….
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…holarship done this summer. Meanwhile, I try to hold it together to write a 800-word piece without crying and wanting to tear my hair out about the pain of my people. I’m not writing prophetic words to you anymore. You fix this shit. I’m done carrying the cross of America, its false promises of democracy and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black peo…
Read More…the world granted federal recognition to same-sex couples’ marriages. The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Brazil are just the largest nations that granted national recognition to same-sex couples’ marriages in the last year. Domestic LGBT movements triumphed by making the case that LGBT rights are fundamental rights, and they now want to see the same conviction incorporated into foreign policy. This movement, though, is happening in a…
Read More…. Though Islam in Panama has a different history and context than in the United States, I saw my parents in some of the older black Panamanian converts. Many spent time in the United States during the formative social justice movements of the 60s and 70s, first becoming attracted to the politics of the Nation of Islam before moving toward mainstream Sunni Islam. Abdul Kabir Malik is one of these converts. In the 1970s, Malik began holding Islami…
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