Religion Dispatches
What better way to rescue a floundering Republican primary campaign than to tap the adopter of the term “Christocrat” to lead your effort? Newt Gingrich has selected former Senator Zell Miller to be the co-chair of his presidential campaign. Miller, a Democrat, infamously spoke to the 2004 Republican National Convention and charged that John Kerry would arm the military with spitballs. But that’s not Miller’s only claim to fame. Earlier in 2004,…
Read More…focus of the sermon (Mother’s Day is the worst, and if you are laughing I bet you know Nancy’s work). But submission theology also permeates every part of Christian life in our young woman’s world. Her interest in things intellectual is looked upon with suspicion or derision. Her leadership qualities are squeezed into “appropriate” but ill-fitting tasks like working with the children. It seems that no part of who she knows herself to be is welcom…
Read More…he fate of the nation’s first major party presidential candidate. But I’ll bet you a twelve pack of caffeine-free Diet Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to ortho…
Read More…ns them the place better than others who make different choices. So, it is better for not better than. I mean, do what makes you better for yourself, but do not confuse it with something that makes you better than another self; which is istikbar. The story of Satan goes like this: when the prototype (or first) human, Adam, was created out of an atom of dust (tin, pronounced “teen”) the unseen creatures were ordered to bow to him. There was a reaso…
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…pubs and restaurants have been selling this data to data brokers. But I’ll bet you it’s not the pubs and restaurants selling the data. What the pub and restaurant owners are doing is scrambling for a quick solution, thinking, we’re not coders. What the hell do we do? So they find an app, and they download the app, made by a company similar to Gloo, and they’re just harvesting data. KGV: And it’s easy, and also in terms of churches of course, socia…
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…an Right leaders are feeling bullish for the first time in years, ready to bet the farm on Sarah Palin, while the rest of us blink in shock as the clock goes spinning back to the Great Depression. In more ways than one—it was in the 1930s that modern fundamentalism’s strange marriage of laissez-faire economics and heavily-regulated morals was first consummated, in reaction not to abortion or homosexuality, but to economic malaise—“spiritual depres…
Read More…express obsolete ideology? Or would blogging help the pope realize that some of his teachings are a wee bit outdated? What next, Pope Benedict on Facebook? If so, you can bet your mortgage that plenty of “good” Catholics will be editing their profiles before they ”friend His Holiness.”…
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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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…k. This time, in late 2008, it is Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican. You bet it doesn’t. In just 142 pages, six chapters, with not a wasted word, Ruether lays out once again her critique of ecclesial patriarchy as life-denying and institution-killing. “When I open her books,” writes Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, in the foreword to the new book, “a force of mind and heart comes out that simply will no…
Read More…threat of eternal damnation. Both liberals and conservatives need to do a better job at digging deeply into the scriptures to find ways to sow affection and dispel the discord we inevitably create with our textual wars over sexual orientation and gender identity. If either liberal or conservative interpretations continue to widen the rift between us, then neither side has gone deep enough in its understanding of scripture. Many on the religious r…
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