Religion Dispatches
…was crucial as many of its leaders are African Americans who reside in the New Orleans East neighborhood where the Vietnamese community is found. New Orleans East is a historically and predominantly African-American region—the largest in the city—so the prospects of cooperation between the two communities was vital. “Both communities have been willing to be in a relationship; it’s just that [the] process has needed assistance, and that was vision…
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…ive centuries ago, we face similar epistemic collapse, endemic skepticism, new and more noxious nationalisms. Our new frightening politics motivated by similar fears and irrationalities, the ever-present specter of climate change and environmental collapse, the terrifying possibilities and hope of technology—all serve to turn our world upside down as the Strasbourgeois world had been. Where then is our Carnival? Or will we, like the dancers of Str…
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…I have seen as a failure of mainline Catholic and Protestant pilgrims into new digital territories to grasp the social nature of new media residing on our phones and tablets and so on—devices that connect us and the information we engage to others in our lives. As Sherry Turkle has argued, we are increasingly mapping the social function of technologies—the real human-to-human characteristics that they approximate by never truly replicate for us—on…
Read More…d cause riots on the streets in big cities across America. According to OneNewsNow, the online news service of Donald Wildmons’ American Family Association, Corbin “contends there is potential for public riots the night of or after the election, if Obama’s lead in the polls does not translate into victory.” “I don’t think that’s something that we’ve looked at very closely, and I think that this could be a powder keg here as we get towards that day…
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…wer format, as if he was of sufficient importance to be interviewed by the news media, Tarrant’s manifesto winds through a rambling set of comments and memes expressing Islamophobia, hatred of immigrants, and a strident right-wing nationalism. Impervious to irony, the Australian Tarrant—himself a foreigner in New Zealand—demands that outsiders be forcibly removed. He shows admiration for the nationalist stance of President Trump and, like Breivik,…
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…vies shape how people, especially children, view the world. In the case of New Orleans and the myriad of cultures it holds, to stint on all of the facets that make New Orleans and Louisiana the wonderful, complex, and sometimes exasperating place that it is is a crime. Disney’s princesses, once again, may have big beautiful eyes, but while kids are enjoying the view, Disney’s hack job of deconstructing history by making it “cute” is just as destru…
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…er the last twenty years has been marked by decline and retrenchment, this new data indicates that one trait of the new public face of religion is what we might call a generous rootedness in tradition. And if these roots—as the Pew data suggest—do not hinder but actually strengthen Americans’ abilities to reach across religious borders to work together for the common good, these findings mark indeed a promising way forward for a country as religio…
Read More…sion to pump up his own media profile in advance of the publication of his new book? Jeffress’ Twilight’s Last Gleaming (featuring a one-page foreword by Mike Huckabee) is due out in January. It predicts the end-times demise of the United States but counsels Christians on how they can make “America’s last days your best days” by being the “light” and “salt” of the world. Advance publicity for the book describes Jeffress as a media personality, lis…
Read More…ss, tell remarkably similar stories of Israeli soldier-assassins who start new lives in New York. By normalizing the image of soldiers and patriots leaving Israel, The Zohan and Restless (like Steven Spielberg’s weightier Munich [2005] both normalize the difficult questions of post-Zionism. Restless, directed by Amos Kollek (son of the longtime mayor of Jerusalem), depicts the reunion of Moshe, a down-and-out Israeli poet in New York, and Tzach, t…
Read More…ne the great digital journalism Carr is talking about. Since moving to our new home at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, RD has welcomed scores of new writers, and is on the verge of rolling out a series of key upgrades to the site—an enhanced reading experience, better integration with social media, peace on earth. (We’ll be updating via our newsletter, here.) It’s our birthday, but it’s you who deserve the party (and the g…
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