Religion Dispatches
…We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless in…
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…e success either. The opening weekend saw sales of more than $6 million in tickets. That’s the kind of number that will inspire others to try and figure out the formula for the faith-and-family blockbuster. Yet, with the cost of the film reportedly exceeding $30 million, it’s an open question whether or not the Left Behind reboot will get a second installment. The marketing problem of evangelical movies is still, stubbornly, a problem. The general…
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…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…
Read More…s might have been treated differently. That was evident, too, in Scalia’s flip dismissal of the costs of the contraceptive methods that Hobby Lobby objects to. Unlike Catholic plaintiffs, Hobby Lobby seeks an exemption from covering ella, Plan B, and IUDs, claiming that they may cause an abortion. Scalia declared these methods “not terribly expensive.” But Verilla pointed out that the IUD, one of the most effective methods of birth control, is al…
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…r), “Monks with Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence,” initially he came to Thailand to study Buddhist pacifism and social activism. But when violence broke out in Southern Thailand between Muslims and Buddhists, he wanted to go and see what the monks were doing there to bring about peace. What he discovered was quite different. The Buddhist monks in the region had little interest in peace-making. Mostly they wanted to defend themselves and their B…
Read More…isquoted, and that his remarks were meant to apply to drug-addicted youth. Thailand: New Constitution to Recognize Third Gender Naith Payton reports at Pink News that Thailand’s new constitution will include references to a third gender: A spokesman for the panel which is drafting the new constitution, Kamnoon Sittisamarn, said this was to ensure all sexual identities would be protected and treated equally under the law. He told Reuters: “We are p…
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…ed: they couldn’t facilitate bribery. We would have to buy new, full-price tickets to Iran. On the phone with JetBlue’s customer service line that night, my righteous fury dissipated quickly. Could JetBlue really be to blame for bad weather, or a mechanical problem, or whatever system error had made our flight impossible? Don’t I benefit regularly from this massive travel infrastructure that, like Lady Justice, doles its punishments out blindly? I…
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…. . [Baseball] satisfies a craving in the nature of people for exciting conflict and is a real substitute for the contest on the hillsides with the rifles. But if baseball quelled some early revolutionary ferment in the Dominican Republic, it proved an easy, if ironic, ally of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary cohorts in Cuba. In the United States, football has arguably supplanted baseball as the national pastime. Cuban baseball has had no such r…
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…ust be made to enforce it. In the April 2007 priesthood session, a musical number was provided by a men’s chorus. The chorus was selected and trained by Brigham Young University professor Rosalind Hall, who also chose the music for the choir—but Hall was not allowed to attend the performance; instead, she was replaced by a male colleague, Ronald Staheli, for that one event. In fact, Hall was not even allowed to be in the conference hall to hear he…
Read More…es over the weekend, and an election day appearance at a Baptist church in Orlando that is serving as a polling place. But three Florida pastors listed as members of the coalition tell me that they knew nothing about it, had not been contacted by the campaign, and had never agreed to serve in that capacity. On Sunday, Pastor Scrivner Damon of New Life Community Church in North Palm Beach, who was listed on the January 28 announcement, looked at me…
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