Religion Dispatches
…od’s Profits: Parsley boasts that over the years he has had four different planes that have shuttled him more than a million miles around the world, allegedly to preach the gospel. The current plane is dubbed Shamgar VII, which Parsley translates as “God on the move.” (In the Bible, Shamgar was a judge who slaughtered six hundred invading Philistines with an ox goad.) In 2007, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and the Senate Finance Committee opened an…
Read More…he death camps in Germany. Put humankind and the common good first. This is one of those statements—and Beck is one of those figures—that only comedy can confront. It doesn’t exist on the plane of serious, genuine and sane discussion, so why respond as though it is? The Daily Show’s Lewis Black (via Keith Olbermann’s Countdown) didn’t:…
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…rocuted in his bath; his body was returned to the United States in a cargo plane carrying American casualties from the war in that same region—of which he had been an especially outspoken and eloquent critic. Father Louis was buried in a simple grave next to the monastery, looking out over the hills he hymned so movingly in many of his finest books. A Friend and Fellow The monk who served as Merton’s confessor in those final, tumultuous years at G…
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…ut I have not encountered any anecdotes of rabbis teaching Talmud with megaphones. A religion of microphones and loudspeakers is a religion of leaders and followers, which is not the same thing as a religion of teachers and disciples. The goal of the latter is to raise the disciple to the level of the teacher; the goal of the former is to keep the followers ‘informed,’ and in formation. For this reader, however, every dimension of this trenchant b…
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…and sinners saints. Nobody deciding at the last minute not to get on that plane. Yes, Glory has something of an epiphany at the end, but it takes no epiphany on the reader’s part to see the uneasy mix of beatitude and desperation in what she feels. Only a Christian of uncommon mettle could write a novel so untainted by the bastardized tropes of Christian culture. It is as if Robinson told us the Nativity story without once evoking Christmas. In o…
Read More…ated to the public in the form of television, radio and Internet ads so we Americans can vote them out of office!!! Wheeler’s current ad opens with the words, “the audacity of jihad,” images of terrorist training and 9/11, and claims that the building is proposed to “celebrate” the murder of 3,000 Americans. Like the 2008 campaign ad, the conflation of images, innuendo, and outright falsehoods is intended to portray the planners of the project as…
Read More…was just one line in it—just a horrific post, I actually sat there on the plane and I thought to myself, that guy cannot be a fan of mine. That guy has to be a poser. He has to be trying to discredit me. I don’t know. And that was the point. I don’t know. It’s getting hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys sometimes. Time will tell if Beck’s renunciation of violence and bigotry is true or if he’ll soon be back to his old tricks, because whi…
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…n’t want to make it seem like I’m gonna start some kind of a revolution in American politics, but… what I’ve basically done was for myself. I wanted to do this for myself because this was the right thing to do, and I believe that it’s compatible with my conservative political beliefs, and that’s based on Constitutional values. And when I came to change my mind about same-sex marriage, I came to understand that this is a Constitutional issue and ev…
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…pposed to be reading something. These books are usually about religion and American history or culture. They often tip people off. A friend of mine, another religious studies Ph.D. student, tells the story of the time he was reading Isis Unveiled in a local coffee shop. He was approached by a very excited man with an interest in Theosophy and other sorts of New Thought systems who talked his ear off for an hour. My friend is Catholic and was readi…
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…perception of Islam? Now, if you talk to an average or semi-well informed American, you don’t have to explain yourself when you talk about mass nonviolent movements in the Middle East, because they will immediately associate that with Egypt and Tunisia. So the American image of the Middle East is changing, but I don’t think it’s changed enough. Still I think there is a lot of fear of Islam and negativity towards Islam. What are most overlooked e…
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