Religion Dispatches
…criticism at bay. Moreover, what if the Mormon convert from Catholicism were to have a born-again Christian conversion—to the kind of Christianity you can bet David Barton and others are “sharing” with him and which Cameron is “praying for.”…
Read More…eas. When the administration tardily ends “don’t ask, don’t tell,” you can bet that this action, too, will be greeted by more yawns than howls. As proof of this decline in the culture wars, Bloomberg News notes that President Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Personnel Management, M. John Berry, is expected to win easy approval, despite the fact that he is openly gay. “Voters aren’t interested in fighting the social-issue battles right now,” s…
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…ry national poll—and in recent battleground state polls—a two-way election between Trump and Joe Biden is a tossup.* In PRRI’s recent American Values Survey, conducted in partnership with the Brookings Institution, nearly all voters who supported Trump in 2020 (94%) said they planned to support him in 2024. More than three-quarters of White evangelicals—along with nearly six in ten of both White non-evangelical/mainline Protestants (57%) and White…
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…these phenomena entail; as these become clearer, things will change, and I bet that the number of folks against these practices will decrease and over time may well even become a minority. Now, our experiment. A clone is an exact genetic copy of an organism. Take, say, the DNA from the nuclei in any cell of Mr. Ramirez (virtually all our cells have the same DNA). Stick that DNA into a new egg, fertilize the egg to start the dance of development, i…
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…her than try to change God’s standards” (1-14-08). 6.) TOP TEN COMPARISONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND DENTISTRY: Between Google ads for “oral sedation” and “dental fear,” blogger Mark Wright writes thoughtfully about many things. On this list he points out, helpfully, that “Both Dentistry and Religion benefit financially from your sins” and reminds us that “In Religion there is the promise of Heaven. In Dentistry there is only Hell.” 7.) BOOKLIST’S TOP…
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…s?” Or does it cause me to view the Bible as merely another supernatural mythos lying behind a fantasy-based experience that distracts me from ordinary daily responsibilities or activities? I won’t be able to resist entering the fray when the beta version is released today, if only to see how we as a culture we are trying to figure out the relationship between play, theology, and performance of belief. If you’re curious to learn of my progress, yo…
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…l world with adolescence hints at this as a kind of rite of passage—a time betwixt and between childhood and full adult responsibilities. Much like game worlds, it occurs within a space where actions have been stripped of real-world consequences, though from the first, we discover that Zoe has discovered ways to make what happens in this space count: she’s turned to it as a space of religious conversion and political activism. One of the recurring…
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…; what I don’t know is whether some of the activists I’ve met would be any better in your tailor-made shoes. Yet it is you who abide the slander whenever someone claims that a more equitable distribution of wealth would retard society by “killing incentive.” In other words, without the motive of making a bundle, people like you wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. Some of us work to be creative and socially useful, but you guys are made of coarser…
Read More…d he blames the Democrats for having an “open checkbook.” Slate’s James Ledbetter, speaking to that pervasive claim, shows why everyone in the voting public needs an education, not just gays tempted to vote Republican: If you really think that the problem with the economy and/or the federal budget is as simple as too much government spending, then you have to point your finger squarely at the national Republican Party. Of the six recent Congresses…
Read More…mockery he has now attracted, this relatively obscure congressman whom I’d bet half the pundits discussing his fate today had barely heard of before his primary win, is a National Superstar, the very embodiment of the Christian Right’s all-too-often abandoned determination to stand up to GOP pols who forever pay them lip service but rarely deliver the goods. […] And if he does win, he will enter the Senate next year not as some random wingnut dude…
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