Religion Dispatches
…s markets became networked, the technology created the possibility and the need for new financial instruments, which are incredibly complicated. All these instruments are being created as a way of distributing and managing risk, but their very proliferation creates more volatility and greater risk. What was developed in order to minimize risk has exacerbated it. When you were writing, what hopes did you have for the book? What hopes can you have f…
Read More…context of a Tea Party-infused, mortgage-meltdown-fueled voter backlash in Nevada. Nevada is about as volatile a place as you’ll find in the American West right now. It has the highest rate of mortgage foreclosures, mortgage fraud, unemployment, and bankruptcy in the nation. Over the last two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than…
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…ean excess: gourmandes who eat and drink far too well; homoerotically inclined men who enjoy the favors of their many doting pilgrims; spendthrifts who have lately taken to fiddling while Athens burns. The story of what happened here is a complicated one, beginning in the very different era of Reagan and Thatcher. Greece was deemed a bad risk in the 1980s and thus money was lent in Greece at nearly 10 percentage points higher than it was in north…
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…e McPherson—did not make the cut. A television travesty if there ever was one! I am encouraged, though, that so many academics tuned in to PBS and that the series has provoked such a vigorous debate. Nevertheless, I wonder if we scholars should think a little more critically about what our criticisms say about us. In the last three or four decades, the distance between the academy and the public has dramatically grown. At the same time, Americans’…
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…ough. It’s too painful to go back. What I’m proposing is a struggle, but a necessary one. But their significance can be exaggerated. When progressives leave their counterparts shape the Church more and more as they like it. Some have tried forming alternative Catholic communities, groups that celebrate their own masses in living rooms and rented halls, sometimes even ordaining their own priests. In the most extreme cases, the result has been margi…
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…you another answer. The Jewish state has a special obligation to the foreigner, to the sojourner in a land that is not his. The Jew must remember his history, first in Egypt and later in other exiles, of being a guest in another people’s land. Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel pleaded with Israel not to deport the children. “Where is the Jewish spirit, the Jewish heart and the Jewish compassion?” The sides were protagonists in an ag…
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…o know. But more often, and especially in regard to social sins, the transgression comes from knowing full well what we need to know and still pretending that we don’t know. In this case we do know full well how the Bush tax giveaways to the rich have burdened future generations with horrendous debt and have greatly accelerated the “secession of the successful” that was already surging in the Clinton years. We do know that carrying the cuts forwa…
Read More…ourself! Think of some mysteries to ponder… like the fact that you or someone you know might have Debra Barone’s plasma coursing through their veins. 3. This might be controversial, but if you face truly irresistible urges to spout some hateful epithet, you could always… (blush)… tweet it at yourself. 4. Get married! This will make you TOO TIRED for harassing people, LOL amirite married folks? 5. When your feverish and overblown imagination gets w…
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…of Israel later evolved into Angles and Saxons? Not to mention that the Stone of Scone used in British coronations over the centuries is the self-same stone that was used at the coronation of King David? I remember that Garner Ted’s manner regarding this malarkey was so calmly matter-of-fact. To me that authoritative tone of his was the clincher. I mention this merely to illustrate how compelling and seductive apocalyptic thinking can be clearly a…
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…in a small community like New Orleans, where people are used to doing business with neighbors they know, like, and trust. Of course, part of the allure of belonging to an elite club is the understanding that not just anyone is allowed in. Membership restrictions mirrored the prejudices of the time and certain segments of society were excluded from parades, parties, clubs, and the chance to rub elbows with dealmakers and power brokers. Today non-d…
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