Religion Dispatches
The Grinches that comprise the family/membership of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas have a knack for turning stomachs. Whether they’re brandishing signs at gay pride parades condemning gays and lesbians to hell or protesting the funerals of U.S. soldiers, they seem to be spreading rage and distaste wherever they appear. Now, the WBC folks are on the warpath in Washington State against the big guy himself – Santa Claus. Westboro Baptist…
Read MoreFamily Research Council and Focus on the Family Hammer Obama on Abortion On Tuesday, October 14, the Family Research Council announced that is FRC Action PAC would be running $100,000 worth of radio and television advertisements in battleground states attacking Senator Barack Obama’s position on abortion. The ad is “aimed at educating voters on … Obama’s promise to make the radical ‘Freedom of Choice Act’ his top priority as president,” an FRC Ac…
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Like for Halloween and Christmas, the sales pitches arrive well before the actual event. Television, radio, newspapers, piles of merchandise in stores you visit, and blogs all announce: Back to School! For some it’s kindergarten, for others, the very first day of college. School is starting soon. And that may mean losing your religion. And no, not the R.E.M. song. Nor, indeed, most of the definitions of the phrase out there—losing your temper, gi…
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I’ve just watched Bill Maher’s cheap-thrills-but-funny-and-semi-provocative Religulous and find myself fantasizing about having “Bill” in my Introduction to Religious Studies course, right next to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and other sort-of-atheists. (I’m talking the nerdy academic’s version of “fantasy football” here.) And I give them the assignment I always give to my eighteen-year-old students: come up with your own de…
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So. Margaret Cho has a blog. If you picture the discussion of religion in the public square, really try to imagine a square, and people gathered around talking, well…what’s happening on Cho’s blog is sort of like a bunch of people hurling…er…manure. But I mean that in a sort of amused way, not in a tut-tut kind of way. It’s just a funny image. Here at RD we are trying to project some kind of earnestness. In the public square we are the ones weari…
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Evangelical conference takes on torture On the same weekend that a little over two-thousand Christian Right leaders and supporters trooped to the nation’s capital for the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voter Summit, a group of concerned Christian leaders met in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss another pressing issue related to values; the use of torture. While the Washington gathering saluted the nomination of Sarah Palin, extolled the virtu…
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When Arun Gandhi, the grandson of one of history’s greatest political actors and thinkers writes publicly that “Israel and the Jews” are the greatest promoters of “a culture of violence,” he speaks with an inherited authority—not to mention the implied comparison between this violent culture and the pacifism of his family legacy. But what did Mahatma Gandhi actually think of the idea of Israel, and of the fate of the Jews of his time? As it turn…
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From yet another person, I’ve just received one of those supposedly curious emails about Barack Obama. But wait, what’s wrong with simply asking questions about our next potential president? Isn’t it about a free and open discourse, that quintessentially American trait? Well, here’s how you test it. When you see “Muslim” replace it with “Jew” or “Christian” (or any number of other affiliations) and ask yourself how you’d feel about receiving an a…
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Anyone who was around to see the media coverage of the events that unfolded near Waco, Texas, in 1993 (when 21 children from the Branch Davidian community were evacuated from the siege of their Mount Carmel Center residence, while 23 children ages 16 and under died in a fiery inferno) cannot help but compare these memories to recent images of the children of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) at the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) ranch near Eld…
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Yahoo has just bought the domain name “OMG.com” for a cool 80K. They plan, it is assumed, to use the URL for their newish entertainment portal, which serves up “celebrity gossip, news, babies, couples, hotties, and more—omg!” Oh my God. It is certainly safe to say, at the very least, that the word “God” is the most vacuous word in the English language. In 21st-century America, no other word is so empty of meaning that it can span linguistic usage…
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