Religion Dispatches
…s?” Or does it cause me to view the Bible as merely another supernatural mythos lying behind a fantasy-based experience that distracts me from ordinary daily responsibilities or activities? I won’t be able to resist entering the fray when the beta version is released today, if only to see how we as a culture we are trying to figure out the relationship between play, theology, and performance of belief. If you’re curious to learn of my progress, yo…
Read More…d the Mormon Church by uniting with Glenn Beck in the two events that were promoted as spiritual. Cameron, known also for his part on the television series Growing Pains and more recently nicknamed Banana-man (along with Ray Comfort) for the anti-evolution DVDs that became the source of tremendous internet humor, said he hadn’t actually been invited to be part of Divine Destiny. But he declined anyway: I had heard that there were plans to put me o…
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…was a testament to the best of human efforts to join together in common cause. 10. RD celebrates its Two-Year Anniversary (February 4th). Sorry. This may have been sacred to only a few… Can you blame me? *** Finally, just so I can’t be accused of slapping the label on any old thing, here is a list of items in the news that, for too many Americans, have nothing at all to do with the sacred—they are thoroughly mundane, lacking in urgency, ultimate…
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…r “religion.” And they are quite explicit about seeking “dominion,” a term used on installations in The Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, for adherents of their own worldview. Not far from the entrance to The Creation Museum, one encounters a series of pseudoscientific posters creating false equivalence between the scientific consensus and the views of young-Earth creationists along the lines of “Some scientists think X, but creationists know Y t…
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…ransgressions of Israel upon him I will also visit the altars of Beth-el: [Bet-is House] [el- is GOD] and the horns [trumpets] of the altar shall be cut off, and fall to the ground. *When the trumpet fell off from Moroni on salt lake temple today.” While this sounded reasonable to many, the following day, several Latter-day Saint scholars of Hebrew had criticized the faulty reading of the passage and pointed out that horns referred to the actual s…
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…ow dark the shadow side of that same instinct can be. When “the way things used to be” involves poisonous racial resentment, the desire to preserve tradition becomes corrupted. Traditionalism isn’t in itself bad, but it can promote social rigidity just by bringing together people like-minded in their stubbornness; at worst, it can lead to radicalization. In fact, radicalization seems to be the bigger picture of white Christianity, and white Americ…
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…United States church that demanded zero tolerance in cases of clergy sex abuse. Still, his personal pastoral response to the emotional and spiritual needs of clergy abuse victims was not what it might have been, at least not in the early days of the scandal. I held Cardinal George’s feet to the flames on many occasions and often wrote things I’m sure he wished I hadn’t, not least of all his 2006 mishandling of the case of Daniel McCormack, a young…
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…er says mildly, “something very disturbing about the state of intellectual freedom at Catholic universities. Where, if not in Catholic universities, can controversial issues be discussed?” One must pose this question to leaders of our many Catholic colleges aud universities: Regis College and St. Michael’s University in Toronto, for example. Obedience, even servility, to ecclesial power reigns. Critical Catholic thinkers who diverge from the views…
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…oosting messages. A generation (or two) before Osteen and Winfrey became household names, Schuller was a spiritual tastemaker, trendsetter, and celebrity himself. A 1983 Los Angeles Times profile titled “The time Muhammad Ali asked for Robert Schuller’s autograph,” concluded with the now prescient lines: When he sees all the other elegant churches and synagogues of the world divesting themselves of their wealth, “Then, you bet, Robert Schuller wil…
Read More…as happened at most houses—the missionaries always offered to shovel the householder’s snow-packed walk. Just to do a good turn. Plant a seed. Leave a positive impression. Knock as he might, a lot of doors are closing in Mitt Romney’s face these days. Minnesota. Missouri. Colorado. He may very well lose Michigan, the state his father governed. Polls even suggest that Arizona, which has a large LDS population and has been described as a Romney “fir…
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