Religion Dispatches
…he American Idol Soul e. Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine f. Carnal Matters: A Conversation between NAMBLA and the Catholic Church g. Unintelligent Church: A Journey Towards Creating a Tea Party Theology h. The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists i. Dawkin’s Demons: Dissecting his Dark Night of the Soul j. Deer Hunti…
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…o’s murder comes the same week as yet another LGBT suicide, this time of 14-year-old Philip Parker, a victim of bullying in his school in Tennessee. In both cases the religious and political sources of hateful rhetoric have deplored, condemned, and above all distanced themselves from these horrible and unexpected tragedies. Which is, in industry parlance, bullshit. Preachers preach because they hope people will take their words seriously, includin…
Read More…is school nickname “Theta Sigma” (ΘΣ) in her graffitied message to him. In New Testament manuscripts, Theta Sigma is a frequent abbreviation for the Greek word theos, meaning “God.” Like many depictions of deities, the Doctor has always had a certain ambiguity about him. From the original pilot episode, he had an unusually high degree of arrogance and irritability for a TV hero. But then again, heroes without limitations or flaws can become uninte…
Read More…goes, depends on turnout.” By 2010, the religious right’s messaging and get-out-the-vote efforts in evangelical churches has probably reached its saturation point. The Alliance Defense Fund and other religious right organizations have launched efforts like “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” designed to test the IRS rule against electioneering from the pulpit. The religious right has been so successful at politicizing so many of the nation’s churches, in fac…
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…ntend with traditional monarchy and modern statehood. But as I watch the latest news from Egypt, that the country’s parliament has been dissolved by a Mubarak-era court, I wonder: Has the revolution ended before it began? (Revolutions are, by definition, simply movements around the wheel: The end is the beginning is the end.) The Islamists made a big mistake in contesting so many seats in this first parliament, for now they have now (among other t…
Read More…Exceptional.” Here’s how America is Exceptional: as Joanna notes, a 17-year-old African-American boy, Trayvon Martin, is shot and killed with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea in his hands, by a white man with a gun on “neighborhood watch.” Trayvon’s trip to the 7-11 was not just a run to the store, but another statistic in the long arc of racialized violence in America. George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon in his role as neighborhood watch captain…
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…which is full of all kinds of glamour and intrigue to me, but might be off-putting to serious Type-A personalities. In The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction, Leofranc Holford-Stevens devotes an entire chapter to Easter and the struggle to find it and map it, which, he posits, was one of the major factors in shaping the modern calendar. Easter has fallen in significance, to put it mildly, which is another reason I think it’s tops. I tend…
Read More…nal security and foreign policy issues, has resigned “in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.” Rubin reported that Grenell’s misogynistic tweets, which he scrubbed from his Twitter account, were not the cause of his departure. It’s not yet clear what efforts, if any, the campaign made to keep him on.* Last week, I noted that while a Log Cabin Republican told the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer that he was going to…
Read More…resident’s patriotism, his commitment to Christianity, and the alleged anti-American-ness of Wright, and therefore Obama. It’s true, of course, that Romney was feebly acknowledging religious pluralism; he has at one time argued that there is no religious test for the presidency. (I wonder if he’s familiar, precisely, exactly, or otherwise, with that today.) When Romney spoke to Hannity last February, it was on the heels of the presidential debate…
Read More…ave left the fold. Or websites devoted to egalitarian, LGBT-inclusive, and open-minded Judaism. The rabbis are right to worry, are they not? Maybe what’s ridiculous here is the irony: tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men using technology, cramming into Citi Field, and learning why they should fear technology. Then again, no ultra-Orthodox authorities can really ban the Internet, and the Hasidim are not like the Amish, willing Luddites rejecting…
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