Religion Dispatches
…nd liberated possibilities (thanks again, Joe Biden). But who knew it would turn out that the NFL has a thing or two to teach the gospel church—born of, but these days largely in flight from, the legacy of King and Rustin and Baldwin—about love, acceptance, and the struggle to overcome in a world of injustice?…
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…high $2.5 million, noting Cook’s “indifference to life” and calling her a flight risk. A few days later, a defrocked priest, described as Cook’s “steady companion,” stepped forward with the cash and promissory note to free Cook. In the days since, the Bishop reportedly has returned to rehab on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, where she stayed in the days before she was booked. Cook is a suspended bishop now, and Episcopal Church officials have begun…
Read More…nd power of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paprocki said. “Be uprooted and put to flight from the Church of God from souls created in the image of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. “Dare no more, oh cunning serpent, to deceive the human race, to persecute the church of God, to shake the chosen of God and sift them like wheat,” he continued. In an unusual use of public services, the exorcism included two armed Springfield police o…
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…een given a second chance. Shem wandered through the desert, following the flight of a bird that led him south to a wide valley where Sana’a now sits. Khalid points to a jagged mountain rising above the city. “Shem came from there.” It almost sounds like he’s talking about something that just happened, like Shem could be coming to visit this afternoon. Times seem to overlap—the ancient bubbling into the present, the mythical figures of Moses and S…
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…cancer, and even an opera singer he meets and befriends on a transatlantic flight. Much of the book is centered on the small loving universe that is peopled by Schaeffer’s immediate family members—his two young grandchildren in particular, whose startlingly perceptive utterances put me in mind of that venerable line in the Bible (Jesus, but quoting Psalm 8): “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise.” The writing style i…
Read More…d well. As Joffe points out, soon after the transvaginal-as-rape meme took flight, “Will abortion clinic staff who perform the ultrasound be seen as ‘rapists,’ as the provider I mentioned earlier worried? This is a possibility not lost on the anti-abortion website LifeNews, which recently ran the headline, ‘If Ultrasound is Rape, Arrest Planned Parenthood Staffers.’” Trudeau doesn’t get this. He told the Washington Post, of the Texas ultrasound la…
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…in the morning and seeing the sun shine and the sky blue and the birds in flight and saying, ‘Thank you God,’ and you’re taking that away from me.” You write “theism promises simplicity and security and delivers neither,” but you do refer to a world that was “not yet ready for atheism.” Do you believe the world is now ready for atheism? As long as there is fear, it will never be fully ready. Fear makes you reach for a supernatural insurance polic…
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…rs. They consisted of: 1) Educated, urban members of the middle- and upper-class: “the ‘intellectuals,’ who will frankly tell you that they have ceased to feel any religious needs. They are readers; they are actively interested in the cultural movements of their time—the arts, music, drama, philosophy, politics—and these suffice them, they believe, for the inner life.” 2) Special-occasion attendees: “They are once-or-twice-a-year worshippers—at Ea…
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…e grandson that it is raining in Delhi, to tracking the arrival of Yusuf’s flight from Pakistan—is premised on Google’s unbounded access to data. Google has so much information, that it almost seems to read the granddaughter’s mind. But who can fault them for it? If benevolent big data can heal partition, who are we to protest? All this places a new spin on recent disclosures that Google harvests its users’ information and sells it to advertisers,…
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…powers that be. Finally, an Afro-Eccentric perspective provides a line of flight from the totalitarian blackness that often characterizes Afrocentric perspectives. Anything you had to leave out? A reader of the book in manuscript form suggested that I shorten the text by removing a substantial amount of material that dealt with scholarly/theoretical deviations from the Standard Narrative of Black Religion. I plan to publish that material separate…
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