Religion Dispatches
…veler. His time machine is the Tardis, which looks like a police box—think phone booth—but it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, can fly, and may actually be a living creature. He adventures through time and space, usually accompanied by one or more human companions who assist him in righting wrongs, liberating the oppressed, fighting alien menaces, and averting unspeakable disasters. His alien origins give him a sharp mind and extraordinary…
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…captioned CNN. It was before sunrise, and I knew it would be a good thirty minutes before daylight would reveal the devastation the 7.0 earthquake had unleashed on Haiti. The man on the neighboring machine, also watching the television, turned to me and said, “You know they killed all the white people after they gained independence… it is that Vodou… they deserve it.” I pedaled along speechless, not sure what shocked me more, that this man would t…
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…gushing waterfall, some of which seemed to be making its way through to my phone. I received a swarm of text messages and emails from different people I know across the country, arriving almost simultaneously: This is the best moment in my lifetime, politically. Shout out to the ancestors who r rejoicing with us 2night! Oh yeah. President Obama! A new day is on the way! Yes GOD can! Yes we can! They didn’t want to give us 40 acres and a mule so da…
Read More…bsite from which he claimed to get his information. He pulled out his cell phone: “Freddie!” he said to an unseen interlocutor. “Will you find me what that website for the saucer, the prophecy, for tomorrow night – the 14th?” He paused, then yelled: “THE SAUCER! All I want is access to the information so I can give it to someone else.” He then recited the web address of a YouTube video. It was my own searches, however, that turned up Goodchild’s w…
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…e a video of the performance, despite a Secret Service prohibition on cell phones, because Makana’s guitar is tuned with a smartphone app. Or, reporters are interested in how Obama, his guests, and security detail responded—or didn’t, as it turned out. But this misses the heart of the story, as Makana’s set at the APEC dinner was less dissenting performance than performative utterance—the songs he played, the protest t-shirt hidden beneath the com…
Read More…me and their money and their votes to deny other people marriage?” Her two-minute video made the website, then the local news in Salt Lake City, and within days an official at LDS Church headquarters placed a concerned phone call to Melanie S.’s local clergy. Three times her bishop met with Melanie to discuss the video. Because she had affiliated with “Mormons for Marriage,” he questioned whether or not Melanie and her husband should be allowed to…
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…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
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…y Six”) The summer months, usually the least busy time in DC, brought us a number of political earthquakes, each of which, under normal circumstances, would have dominated headlines for weeks. First, the FBI searched the former President’s Mar-a-Lago residence, prompting bitter reactions from a number of Republicans, in some cases openly weighing political violence as a tool of reaction. Lindsey Graham predicted “riots in the streets,” should Trum…
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…thored the play Us & Them performed at Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre, wrote a number of pivotal speeches for the Anti Prop. 8 Movement and the popular “It Gets Worse” viral video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign. Fox optioned his pilot “Yearbook” as part of their Diversity program, his pilot, “rare” (about a family of cannibals who immigrates to America) was brought to HBO by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Emily Ziff’s Cooperstown Productions a…
Read More…meeting (as candidates do). Her answer was great, and it’s worth taking a minute to understand why. First, let’s roll the clip: https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1107841344553316352 I am an admitted Warren fan, though I haven’t backed her in the 2020 primary. But this is first of all a master class in taking an off-message question and steering the subject back to what the candidate wants to talk about. It takes discipline and preparation to com…
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