Religion Dispatches
Rabbi Yehuda Levin knows how to get press – emulate Pat Robertson. Levin, the spokesman of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, issued a press release today warning that lifting the military ban on gays and lesbians serving open in the military is equivalent to the “spiritual rape” of the military: When Americans are suffering economically and millions need jobs, it’s shocking that the Administration is focused on its ultra-liberal militantly homo…
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Nearly four years ago on June 1, 2020, Federal officers violently cleared peaceful protestors from Washington DC’s Lafayette Square in order to make way for Trump to stand in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church and hold a Bible.* He had just given a speech at the Rose Garden, vowing to use military force to quell national protests over police brutality and the recent murder of George Floyd. As soon as he finished, he walked across the street wit…
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I have to admit that Michelle Huneven’s new novel was almost too delicious for me, even more addictive than a box of chocolate truffles or a big bag of Cape Cod potato chips (with sea salt, naturally). I know too much about the book’s setting in Pasadena and the neighboring village of Altadena, where I lived the tiny bungalow life for ten happy years. I also know too much about the inner life of congregations. And I recently soaked up more than I…
Read MoreThe United Methodist News Service is reporting that over 600 clergy and lay members of the denomination are seeking church discipline against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his role in the Trump administration’s policy of separating detained migrant families at the U.S. border: The group claimed in a June 18 statement that Sessions, a member of a Mobile, Alabama, church, violated Paragraph 2702.3 of the denomination’s Book of Discipline. Spec…
Read More…n of religious liberty and free speech rights–in other words, painting the business owners as the victims–the Commissioner, Brad Avakian, summarily dispatched with that claim in his opinion. The Oregon public accommodations law, which prohibits discrimination against customers based on, among other things, sexual orientation, does not violate the free exercise or free speech rights of business owners, Avakian wrote. He cited the United States Supr…
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…e way. In the book you predict that “the body is only going to be a bigger business.” Are there downsides to commodifying fitness? Or will the relationship between bodies and business be mutually beneficial? I think the downsides come when people essentially go too far. When it not only becomes a life style but it turns into a little bit of an obsession. In my research I discovered people who were recovering alcoholics and addicts who stopped drin…
Read More…ed to enlighten alumni, students, faculty, and others from the surrounding business community in the sold-out auditorium on the ways in which practices of compassion can enrich—spiritually and materially—the lives of business people. Thus, CCARE director James Doty began his introduction of His Holiness by noting the financial consequences of the fast-paced, stress-filled, competitive lifestyles that characterize the entrepreneurial high tech indu…
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…y from Christian good works to working hard in the checkout line—made good business sense. “Everyone wants to feel that what’s important to them can be serviced in their labor,” Moreton said. Wal-Mart, she noted, “managed very cannily” to allow workers to feel that their values were being respected, so that they could get away without providing for other needs—like a living wage. Low wages and few benefits, then, were an integral part of the co…
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…rty), but rather a “Christian worldview” organization that brings together business leaders and pastors (including Kimbrell’s own pastor, Frank Page, a one-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention and now the head of its executive committee, and one of President Obama’s first appointees to the Advisory Council to his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships). The country “cannot be successful without a fundamental Judeo-Christi…
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…arch of History. No longer merely serving the ambitions of an aristocratic class, wars were now “engines” of history, crucial junctures at which nations, peoples, and classes revealed their true nature and purpose, fulfilling their historical destiny. Clearly, the technoscientific side of Hegel’s impression is only part of the story. The Weltgeist was, quite explicitly, a concept through which Hegel sought to synthesize Christian metaphysics with…
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