Religion Dispatches
…r 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 orthographically challenged “Heaven is…
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…the Times of Israel, that 85% of the 80,000 Americans living in Israel who used its services voted for Romney. Of course that doesn’t prove that Jews are voting in greater numbers for Romney this year, just that Jews who used iVoteIsrael’s services did. Certainly there are Jews in the U.S. who hold this view (the RJC, after all, is not supported by Adelson alone). Detroit Free Press religion reporter Niraj Warikoo reports on Twitter that hundreds…
Read More…ng and number of pregnancies they have, many of them opt to do so; not because they are mindlessly driven to do so by the sociological version of Van Der Waals forces, but because undergoing pregnancy and giving birth to babies involves trade-offs specific to women. There are health risks that come with pregnancy, up to and including death. Less dramatically, there are things you can’t do if you have three children under five and are pregnant with…
Read More…assault rifles to keep in their homes in the Los Angeles suburbs—just because they could, and just because someone might think that they shouldn’t. And, once in a long while, guns meant a drive into the manzanita-thicketed Southern California foothills with Dad to aim into the dusty hillsides. Guns were what boys got to do. More precisely: guns were what sons got to do. How could I not have a thing for guns? Second confession: I no longer have a…
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…ts when they’re told they cannot come to an event and by coming it would cause a disruption. Yet they haven’t told those 15 to 20 people who protested, 15 to 20 people compared to the thousands on top of thousands coming out to worship Jesus and to hear the gospel of music. The promoters had the greatest integrity and fought very hard for this to continue on, but the mayor office systematically and continuously shut it down…. This is unfortunate,…
Read More…re also hateful protesters who, whether motivated by Islam or some other cause, despise Christians and attack them and their churches. But where do Egypt’s Christians go from here? What kind of country will Egyptians wake up to tomorrow? This is the pretext for military intervention. My preemptive proof? It’s more predictive. The military will use the resulting instability that emerges from its own violent crackdowns to belay democracy, arguing th…
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…Israeli youth who, after refusing army service, were subject to KGB-like abuse by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service. Most Israelis know all this. Most American Jews do not, even though a film like The Gatekeepers has been around for almost two years. But Blumenthal’s medium, a combination of myopic perspective, selective focus, and a limited understanding of context and history subverts a valuable opportunity to present another side of this ug…
Read More…atives as out of the mainstream (at least for a state like New York) has caused a frenzy against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Charles Pierce: The other day, Cuomo gave a radio interview in which he made the unremarkable point that the kind of Republican who wins elections in, say, Alabama, likely would have something of a tough row to hoe in New York. “If they are extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York,” Cuomo said i…
Read More…ted a church that delivered on its promises of inclusion, tolerance, and love and were failed so profoundly by churches in the stranglehold of homophobic rhetoric and abuse. Young people are repulsed by it. And if this atheist had to venture a guess, I bet that Jesus would be too….
Read More…ike the Sabbathday Lake Shaker site, which is both a religious community, museum, and shop, The Wooster Group has also struggled with the tension between a somewhat Spartan existence and the temptations of commerce—Willem Dafoe, founding company member, left the group, and his relationship with Liz LeCompte, supposedly lured by Hollywood fame. Meanwhile, The Wooster Group recently attracted bona fide movie star Frances McDormand to join their rank…
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