Religion Dispatches
…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….
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…ollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going back to work even at the risk of death. It goes almost without saying that there’s more than a little connection between conservative economic ideology and conservative racial ideology. Part of the performa…
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…ot is 90% effective against the original strain of COVID, and that it “generates an immune response against the omicron variant.” That’s a less-than-helpful formulation, given that the original strain has long since been pushed out of the ecosystem by Delta and Omicron (to say nothing of “Omicron 2”). Is there anything to recommend this shot, other than how it was developed? If not, it seems like a pretty cheap tout. Moreover, touting the drug’s f…
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…he enslavement of Black bodies, located within an empire carved out of the cheap labor and natural resources stolen from the Global South, future seminarians at these six institutions can continue, without any pangs of conscience, to lift their eyes to the heavens in thanksgiving to their white God, who richly blessed them according to the loving mercies God holds for “his” chosen. But woe unto us who lack faithfulness to whiteness and insist on m…
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…of life too. Joining a church in a new town is the way to get quickly integrated into the community. It’s comparable to the role of the village pub in the UK. There’s a story that just broke in the past week. We have a track-and-trace system—it’s not working very well, but a track-and-trace system in Britain for COVID. And you go into a pub, and you have to download an app. You put your details in. And that’s fine, but the pub didn’t build the app…
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…ell, Jr.’s professional implosion, much to the delight of liberals and moderates on Twitter, who followed the unfolding trainwreck closely all day. Indeed, the exciting conclusion of the Falwell “pool boy” saga upstaged the first day of the Republican National Convention to some extent, at least on political Twitter. https://twitter.com/RobGeorge/status/1297948042218426371?s=20 https://twitter.com/NormOrnstein/status/1298042172432949253?s=20 On Su…
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Talk is cheap, and sentimental talk cheapens public discourse in dangerous ways at a time when total sobriety is required. Eight weeks into a public health and economic catastrophe, the facts before us should be sobering enough: Disease and death in this pandemic overwhelmingly afflict communities of color (e.g. despite making up just a third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbe…
Read More…ose reading of Scripture is cramped, at best. Seen in this context, it’s a cheap dodge for liberals within the UMC to blame churches and delegates from the Global South for the vote to retain (and even heighten) the denomination’s ban on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the Un…
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…Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the public to think more critically about what “religion” is. They are dire…
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…structure of public life, as policymakers traded easy credit and access to cheap consumer goods for high wages and a measure of economic security. It is no coincidence that all of this took shape in the wake of the civil rights movement, the fracturing of the New Deal coalition and the end (for those who had enjoyed it) of the Fordist economic order of male breadwinners and traditional families. Opposition to broad redistribution on the basis of r…
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