Religion Dispatches
…the therapist’s couch. From their first moments, online spaces have mingled the privacy of the truck stop bathroom wall and that of the confessional. Penance on the iPhone, whether or not it grows from its larval state, is a fascinatingly unabashed conjunction of the two….
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…craft engaging narratives. In sum, those of us sitting comfortably in our cheap desk chairs in our sterile offices in the nation’s colleges and universities have no higher ground to stand on. While we all labor to maintain an appropriate level of nuance, complexity, and context in our work, there is no doubt that we could write bigger books and assign our students more reading to gain deeper contextualization and fit more people and more themes a…
Read More…of the jostle and the necessity of the inconvenience. But still, I would draw the line: jostle there, but not in the shops to buy cheap token souvenirs made in China….
Read More…ps, dresses, and scarves. I feel like I need one more scarf. Not for sheer number, but for style; there are so many styles, and one has to decide what works best individually. I have my long prayer scarves that do not need any pins to be neatly kept in place. But they are really long, and I wish I had at least one as neat, but shorter. I want to be hands-free and secure at the same time. I have long rectangular shapes that get draped, and I will u…
Read More…ast two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wage…
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…ry Into that atmosphere—one part boom town, and one part Wild West—we now inject the unlikeliest of financial players: the monks of the Vatopaidi Monastery on the sacred peninsula of Mount Athos. Mount Athos is considered to be the most sacred geography in the Orthodox Christian world. Its oldest monasteries were built in the 10th century, and there are currently twenty of them (19 Greek and one Russian Orthodox) scattered along the lovely coast…
Read More…citement at the realization that I can manipulate people into being how I enjoy, or hurt them for not being how I enjoy. The desire to protect one’s children: that, too, can so easily become corrupted. Is sexuality caught up in this inescapable flood of cultural sewage, for Augustine? Sure, but so is education, government, and heck, representational thought itself. Because, my God! the things we do to one another. [deep sigh] Well, anyway. It’s b…
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…l that divides us, whatever it is. The bread and wine we use is materially cheap and unsatisfying; what we experience in them is supposed to come from a wealth beyond. In the presence of God, and among people of different races, classes, and opinions, the mass should nourish us in our common humanity. So whom exactly is one harming by boycotting, by staying home in solitary prayer? The earthly Church might miss your money in the collection—that’s…
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…nitial payments made to the middlemen for the chance to come or simply to enjoy Israel’s economic boom. Others came as near-indentured servants who were forbidden to work for anyone but the employer who first hired them, until the Supreme Court finally ruled that this arrangement violated basic human rights, annulling in the process their discriminatory work permits. These “guest” workers, who today number between 250,000 and 400,000 (half of whom…
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…the full weight of religious testimony argues that it only compounds the injuries of a massive injustice to remain silent—that the only way forward is by breaking open the pretenses and presumptions of the powerful. Sin takes many forms. Sometimes sin arises from failing to know the things that we ought to know. But more often, and especially in regard to social sins, the transgression comes from knowing full well what we need to know and still p…
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