Religion Dispatches
…ork for you. The article literally discusses someone getting Third-World peasants to loan her a cell in a pinch. You don’t get much more entitled than that. Still, there is something to be said for the virtues of unhooking from technology. I sometimes wonder if the convenience of having a cell is worthwhile, given that one of its most common uses is to find out where my wife got to in Kohl’s. But it seems to me that focusing on the micro-trend of…
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…nalism is good, but individualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marriages in many countries. I am glad to see that in Section 34 he understands this basic fact of contemporary western culture: The ideal of marriage, marked by a commitment to exclusivity and stability, is swept aside whenever it proves inconvenient or tiresome. The fear of loneliness and the desire for stability and fidelity exist sid…
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…n a job interview, that you won’t minister to same-sex couples, says Timo Laato, Lecturer at Lutheran School of Theology, Gothenburg, Sweden. The Church of Norway has officially two views on marriage, and gender is seen as irrelevant to a marriage. A pastor should not question the two views. According to a bishop, there is no room for those in the Church, who call the Church’s new doctrine as schismatic, says Rolf Kjøde, Director of Continuing Edu…
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…ue wasn’t the kind of thing that we could call a “motherfucker.” It was incapable of the act—too abstract to be blamed or cursed. Recent findings in cognitive psychology indicate that we blame at an individual level, using mental systems adapted for life in small groups. It is psychologically difficult to blame large, abstract entities—like government agencies or corporations—in a meaningful or satisfactory way. Ideologies and conspiracy theories…
Read More…Period Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election—if Senator Barack Obama wins, expect a spate of “The Religious Right is Dying/Mortally Wounded” articles—the Religious Right will not disappear from the American political landscape in the near or distant future. In fact, if you follow the money, which is what Americans United for Separation of Church and State is doing, you’ll see that “the nation’s leading Religious Right organizatio…
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…than theater and more sacred than peace, all the while inflicting as much damage as possible. The sum resources of a culture—its science, its religion, its poetry, its prejudice—mobilize in the service of that cause. These are as much the technologies of war as the weapons themselves. At least since Carl von Clausewitz first spoke of the “fog of war” (an inevitable unknowing that reigns over every battlefield), the challenge of warfare has been to…
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…he better evening because of his way with a microphone and his remarkable capacity to modulate his voice (not to mention outing himself as LDS pastor and bishop). But it was Billy Graham’s endorsement, splashed into our faces via an expensive full-page Sunday New York Times ad, that triggered my flat-out recognition: the 94-year-old daddy of all televangelists is laying his bony patriarchal hands upon a fellow preacher who shares his hawk-like pro…
Read More…far-right organization named “Emergency Committee for Israel” has produced a cheap YouTube video showing a couple of crazy people at Occupy Wall Street shouting antisemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments behind the Occupy movement; ergo, the three of them must hate the Jews too. This, of course, is ridiculous. As everybody should know by now, Occupy is a leaderle…
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…l experience for me.” A friend called me a couple of weeks ago with an extra ticket to see U2 ’s Joshua Tree tour. I remembered liking some of their songs on the radio, and knowing that everything sounds better at a live concert, I happily accepted. Having not yet been lured into the cult of Bono’s personality, all I knew was the legend that preceded him—international poverty relief icon, (aging) Gen-X sex symbol, and all-around good guy. As the o…
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…S this week. Pope Francis will find a church that is markedly different in a number of significant ways; so different, in fact, that it calls into question whether we can still refer to the Catholic Church in the US. When JPII made his first visit US, he found a church that was in transition but largely intact. Some 40 percent of Catholics went to mass in any given week and there were nearly 60,000 Catholic priests and 135,000 nuns, with the natio…
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