Religion Dispatches
…ular? Energy/Climate: I’m not that hot—are you? We in the One Percent will manage to stay cool by any means necessary as the rest of you suffer. Regulation More Broadly: You can catch up with our death-and-debt-dealing corporate friends AFTER the damage is done, OK? That’s the American Way. That’s the House Republicans. And on the Senate side: Presidential Appointments: It is our firm intention to thwart and destroy this president; effectively …
Read More
…h the Tea Party finds its roots. He was a speaker at the Reconstructionist American Vision’s annual “Worldview Conference” in 2009, has been a member of the Council for National Policy, and is a longtime homeschooling advocate from a Reconstructionist perspective. In 1996 he was the running mate of conservative icon (and Christian Reconstructionist) Howard Phillips for the far-right US Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party) whose plat…
Read More…ward Change.org, which provides a platform activists can use to create and manage petitions. On Monday, Change.org deleted a wildly inflammatory petition supporting the sodomy ban because it violated Change.org’s guidelines on hate speech. The petition included links to anti-gay materials from American religious right groups and leaders including Paul Cameron, the Traditional Values Coalition and MassResistance. Other anti-gay petitions were also…
Read More
…stories. It asks not just about faith and doubt, but also about how we can manage to live with people we think are dangerously wrong about important matters. For political liberals like me, it’s about the challenge of loving the blockheads all around us. In previous years, I sympathized with Linus’s earnest, countercultural faith in the Great Pumpkin, a benevolent, all-knowing gourd he hopes to meet on Halloween night. While the rest of the Peanut…
Read More
…e room.” “Have you ever been experienced?” A tribute to U2’s longtime tour manager, Dennis Sheehan, who had died earlier in the day appears at the end of the band’s concert at The Forum arena in Los Angeles on May 27. Photo by Cathleen Falsani for Religion Dispatches. After attending a U2 show in San Jose, Calif., earlier this month, Noel Gallagher of the band Oasis described it as a “psychedelic experience” that was “staggering.” “It starts off a…
Read More…spite the fact that Church founder Joseph Smith initially ordained African-American men. How were you raised to understand the Church’s priesthood ban, and how do you now view it? Was the LDS Church wrong to withhold priesthood from men of African descent? As members of a minority religion, Mormons like Romney and Huntsman have learned to be very pragmatic in the way they manage the relationship between personal faith and public decision-making….
Read More…e mahram. So even that year I was denied, a female friend of mine (another American woman) made umrah a alone because she worked it out with the tour agency. This year, I am just plain old old. (Double OLD intended.) I am old enough to travel without a mahram. So actually I am not as nervous about that as I am about the second extenuating circumstance. In 2005 when I accepted an invitation to lead a mixed-gender public ritual prayer on a Friday in…
Read More
…e were seeking to join the church just to get ahead in imperial society, Cyril, the bishop, instituted an elaborate process of Christian initiation and began celebrating the sacraments only behind closed doors, in order to keep out those who were not full members of the church. Cyril’s aim was to manage people’s identities: did they identify with Christ, or the empire? If they were committed to Christ, then they would express that commitment out o…
Read More
…one is lost; lending your experience to a younger colleague struggling to manage a complex case; telephoning a patient and listening to how she is faring after surgery and chemotherapy for her breast cancer; extending yourself beyond the usual working day to help others because that is much of what it means to be a doctor. But not one minute of such time may be accountable for reimbursement on a bean counter’s balance sheet. Groopman also marks t…
Read More
…their electoral base. Those who create monsters, after all, do not usually manage to control them. And I know this particular monster intimately: I was raised as an evangelical and even bussed to an anti-abortion protest by my family’s church at the age of 11. It’s just that I didn’t see an immediate path to the overturning of the crucial 1973 decision. Also, Republican-controlled states had managed to severely restrict access to abortion, renderi…
Read More