Religion Dispatches
…ps, dresses, and scarves. I feel like I need one more scarf. Not for sheer number, but for style; there are so many styles, and one has to decide what works best individually. I have my long prayer scarves that do not need any pins to be neatly kept in place. But they are really long, and I wish I had at least one as neat, but shorter. I want to be hands-free and secure at the same time. I have long rectangular shapes that get draped, and I will u…
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…ate break-in. The first international oil embargo and the disappearance of cheap gas. The US embassy rooftop retreat in Saigon. Disco. Nixon’s resignation took out a symbol of corruption, but the demoralizing corruption lived on. It is not surprising, then, that the nation’s anxiety was marked by a turn to religion, even if that turn was unexpected. Some protestant mainline churches that had been engaged in the civil rights movement, well, moved o…
Read More…gths, and the great expense of a high-power law firm, to try to score some cheap political points on the backs of same-sex couples.” I suppose Boehner can pander to the religious right and continue to defend “traditional” marriage, but I think it’s fair to ask why—when jobless rates continue to hover near 10 percent—which issue may be most important to God: how people arrange their intimate relationships, or how we feed and care for those families…
Read More…hese are big words — hope, forgiveness and peace. They rarely have the megaphone that the party of “nope” enjoys. Nevertheless, they are words that religious people need to protect with all our hearts and souls. We too need a department of homeland security and its job is to protect our words. Let’s start with hope. When a tragedy happens, it often steals our hope. The 9-11 bombing is a terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy with causes in a larger hum…
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…dimension of empathy. Perhaps the best tribute to him came from one of our number who famously and irreverently said: “I put my trust in Howard Moody and God, in that order.” We are forever grateful for this good man. ____________ Editor’s Note: As a generalist, an editor frequently must guide and shape work on unfamiliar topics. Having heard only that Rev. Moody was one of those “hip, old preachers in the Village,” I set out to do the obligatory…
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…cts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that…
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…God loves you because your priest told you so? And so on. These were not cheap shots. He was serious. He loved us, he loved his job, and his questions were troubling. Some students wept. At which point he would offer Kleenexes. It was in Fr. Cavanaugh’s class that I began to see that all true education is intensely personal. Dawkins’ distaste for an officially atheist academy may be mere iconoclasm. But maybe not. Maybe it’s closer to the truth…
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…There, she found Ted at the nadir of his professional life, moving between cheap motels with his wife Gayle and two of their five children as he went door-to-door, selling life insurance to strangers. From the pinnacle of evangelical leadership to this? Pelosi later told an interviewer that the story of Haggard’s exile was too compelling in its complexity to pass up. How the mighty had fallen! She brought along her camera, and the Trials of Ted Ha…
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…nging rainbow flags to promote Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is a cheap tactic if LGBTQ employees are treated poorly when it comes to pay, benefits, leave, promotion, and job security. Divide-and-rule is not a new tactic, for it’s well known in the Indian subcontinent that the British pitted one local Raja against the other based on tribe, religion, or caste—among other factors. The same applies to corporations as they stoke divisiveness…
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…he enslavement of Black bodies, located within an empire carved out of the cheap labor and natural resources stolen from the Global South, future seminarians at these six institutions can continue, without any pangs of conscience, to lift their eyes to the heavens in thanksgiving to their white God, who richly blessed them according to the loving mercies God holds for “his” chosen. But woe unto us who lack faithfulness to whiteness and insist on m…
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