Religion Dispatches
…panying social assumptions would not be accosted in the process of working deals. What we have heard recently in some circles certainly suggests this stance: How could he pick for prayer someone whose religious sensibilities support the dehumanization of certain groups? How could Obama make such a concession; doesn’t he recognize the implications? These questions have come from many quarters—agnostics, atheists, liberal Christians, and so on. Let…
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…as an “affluent LGBTQ-activist couple” who are alleged to have committed a number of crimes connected to the sexual abuse of their adopted children. Overnight, the tragic story of the Zulock children’s alleged abuse became proof to far-right activists that children aren’t safe with queer people. (This outrage is applied selectively, as other stories featuring cisgender, heterosexual predators creating and distributing child sexual abuse images—suc…
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…ulate a vibrant Jewish thinking beyond the binary of theism and atheism. A number of thinkers have reached the conclusion that the aniconic ramification of the monotheistic creed is the undoing and demythologization of theism whence it follows that the final iconoclastic achievement of monotheism would call for destroying the idol of the very God personified as the deity that must be worshipped without being idolized. Levinas had this in mind when…
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…of administration cronies, and began reshaping how the federal government deals with the needs of the poor. Despite the administration’s ceaseless touting of its “compassionate conservativism” and its desire to unleash “armies of compassion” to deal with the nation’s social ills, Bush’s faith-based initiatives never made it out of Congress; no effective legislation was passed. Team Bush was able to establish Faith-Based and Community offices at e…
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…d well-paid neo-liberal types who gave us the NAFTA and other skanky trade deals have the nerve to keep saying, “Trust us. We know better than you. This will be good for you.” Very much what Mr. Obama has been saying about his RTTT program. Ethically speaking, this much should be obvious: public education must never be structured like one of those ghastly reality television shows in which the winners are lauded (and often given false hope) while t…
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…enounce the antisemitism of West and Irving respectively. Also there are a number Black Jews who felt compelled to denounce West and Irving as not being legitimate Black Jewish voices and causing harm to real Black Jews (read: some attachment to the White Jewish community via birth, marriage, or conversion). This has set up a troubling dichotomy of the “good” Black Jews versus the “bad” Black Hebrew Israelites. The mission of the good Black Jew is…
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…t people don’t connect faith to the seemingly commercial details of, say, iPhones, or robots that care for the elderly, or the dynamics of personal relationships conducted over Skype, even though these changes have a bearing on the way we relate to other human beings. As an alternative to this silence, Staley’s work touches on two possible modes of religious response to technology, which I’ll call—because sci-fi topics deserve sci-fi names—the Str…
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…ial is evidenced by one of the most striking findings in the survey, which deals with support for same-sex marriage among clergy in the “Uncertain Middle” (which, remember, is a 41 percent plurality of the overall group). When asked whether they support marriage for same-sex couples, civil unions but not marriage, or no legal recognition at all, only 26 percent of clergy in the uncertain middle initially choose marriage equality. But when asked a…
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…obstacles in his way—everything from traffic accidents to rigged business deals—and threaten Norris with death if he reveals their existence to anyone. One angel, nicknamed “The Hammer,” (played beautifully by Terence Stamp) warns that if he follows his heart, not only his dreams but Elise’s too will be ruined; he issues this warning in the form of an injury during her performance. So Norris faces a dilemma: Will he resign himself to fate, or pur…
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…the kind bitterly denounced by Jeremiah: “from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely: they have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” Wallis likes to tell people that he knows everyone who is anyone among the great and the good in Washington, regardless of political persuasion. He has become a consummate inside player. He hasn’t a negative thing to say about anyone, except perhaps when it co…
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