Religion Dispatches
…ons are not characteristic of the educators and legislators who passed the new Louisiana law, but you can be sure that the Darwinist opponents of the law will try to make them sound representative. The same thing happened in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005 when school board members decided to grab onto the phrase (not the reality) of “intelligent design” to promote religious doctrine. The board members, as in Livingston, Louisiana, were as ignorant o…
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…cularly black religious folk traditions? To make lemonade out of lemons is code for powerful spiritual practice in the hands of women. Since the beginning of chattel slavery in this country, black women have been magically making something from nothing, conjuring up lives for themselves and their families with nothing but crumbs, dust and ashes. “By giving us an ensemble cast of black women and girls, with songs of joy and pain, beauty and sorrow,…
Read More…l was erected on the Temple grounds… – from a mishna (early rabbinic legal code) tractate about fast days (Ta’anit 4:6) This year the 17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, a minor fast day in the Jewish calendar, falls in the middle of Ramadan, when Muslims the world over fast during the day to commemorate the month of Mohammad’s prophecy. It also falls at a time when Israel and Hamas are exchanging bombs and rockets aimed at killing the other s…
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…s fiftieth anniversary, the Pledge was incorporated into the National Flag Code. Ten years later, in the shadow of the Cold War, two weighty words, “under God,” were added. It has become the creed of the state religion, taught early and often to our children. The Very Revd Will H. Mebane, Jr., Interim Dean at St Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Buffalo, NY, grew up in the South in a fairly conservative religious household. He encountered the Flag at…
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…the way the world itself was made.” While the ritual aspects of the Mosaic code aimed at guiding the Israelites, the theological, ontological, and ethical principles, continued into the Second Testament, aim at guiding all. The human task is to grapple with those principles—to discern how they promote our flourishing—and to further them secondarily, as co-creators. Why is such attention given to the stranger and what good could come from offering…
Read More…eeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism is getting high-tech. A new computer program uses an algorithm to discern various writers in the biblical text. Kudzu Jesus: “You can’t spray Jesus with Roundup.” Oh, and a giant Jesus in Peru. The FBI invited Westboro Baptist Church to be a part of its domestic terrorism training program. The goal was to give officers a chance to se…
Read More…er Rodney Croome. Poland: Pro-LGBT Sister Jeannine Gramick tours Poland At New Ways Ministry’s Bondings 2.0 blog, Francis DeBarnardo profiles New Ways Ministry’s co-founder Sister Jeannine Gramick’s week-long speaking tour in Poland last fall: She was invited for a week-long speaking tour about Catholic LGBT issues, sponsored by the country’s leading LGBT equality organization, “Campaign Against Homophobia,” and its main Christian groups, “Faith a…
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…in American society that images of Christ are not the real issue, but just code for broader sets of values for particular groups? Paul Harvey: The fact that the white Jesus was in the stained glass window of 16th St. Baptist emerged from a long history in which the image of Jesus represented, in one sense, racial and class structures deeply embedded in American society. That’s why that image, and not some other, was there in the window in the firs…
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…ous mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code. Sagan has a reputation as a proto-New Atheist, but his novel suggests he was intensely sympathetic to religious experience and authority. By the end of his novel he has his scientist protagonist embark on a career of “experimental theology” after she has discovers the “signature” of God in the very structure of the universe. At the same time, Sagan was not impressed by the creationism of Christian fundament…
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…trinating children and society through propaganda at all levels.” Vatican: New document on priesthood affirms ban on people with ‘deep-seated’ gay tendencies In a new document on the priesthood, the Vatican said that people with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” or who “support the so-called ‘gay culture’” cannot be priests, reports the Washington Post’s Julie Zauzmer. The statement, released by the Congregation for the Clergy but approved by Po…
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