Religion Dispatches
…cancer, and even an opera singer he meets and befriends on a transatlantic flight. Much of the book is centered on the small loving universe that is peopled by Schaeffer’s immediate family members—his two young grandchildren in particular, whose startlingly perceptive utterances put me in mind of that venerable line in the Bible (Jesus, but quoting Psalm 8): “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise.” The writing style i…
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…een given a second chance. Shem wandered through the desert, following the flight of a bird that led him south to a wide valley where Sana’a now sits. Khalid points to a jagged mountain rising above the city. “Shem came from there.” It almost sounds like he’s talking about something that just happened, like Shem could be coming to visit this afternoon. Times seem to overlap—the ancient bubbling into the present, the mythical figures of Moses and S…
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…life in jail.” The theme of alienation is expressed in the song’s focus on flight—from the law, from society, even from friends. And yet we are drawn to identification with an outlaw so alienated from the rest of the world, he believes the Devil is his only friend. In my ministry as an Anglican deacon, leading ministries that offer food, clothing and, most important of all, fellowship to homeless folks living on the streets of Vancouver’s West Sid…
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…blaming of black individuals is actually based on judgments about African Americans at the collective level. Politicians, pundits, and pastors, white and black alike, consistently argue that the criminal behavior of black individuals is in part attributable to deficiencies in “black culture.” Crime would not be so high in black communities, they suggest, if African Americans properly valued marriage, family, and work. By contrast, the financial c…
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…gained none of that equity appreciation. The result is that today, African American family incomes are about 60% of white family incomes, but African American wealth is about 5% of white family wealth. And that difference is heavily attributable to federal race-based housing policy. The desperate conditions of many families in inner city ghettos today is largely attributable to desperate economic disadvantages that can be traced directly to federa…
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…of a sermon Cook preached months ago to a sparsely attended Sunday morning service. The Bishop spoke in words that now seem pathetic as well as chillingly prophetic: “Things happen suddenly, and we’re either prepared in the moment or we’re not, and we face the consequences. We can’t go back. We can’t do it over” (7:07). There’s another, more pointedly political angle to this story: the case of Bishop Cook has become a meme in the ideological warfa…
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…s and cultures—it’s not easy, after all, to cultivate a reputation for top-flight scholarship while simultaneously signaling common cause with evolution-denying right-wing conservatism. Given the emptiness of Wheaton’s theological censure of Dr. Hawkins, it seems even more unlikely that Wheaton’s move to fire Dr. Hawkins is a principled defense of evangelical orthodoxy. In fact, it seems fair to presume that the optics of this situation are delibe…
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…at was supposed to be the original site of the Academy Awards. Post white-flight in the sixties and seventies Inglewood became a predominantly African American community. It now “boasts” an eclectic array of faith institutions from Church of Scientology storefronts to mosques. I think the cover evokes many of the book’s themes about whiteness, innocence and redemption; bringing it full circle to the last chapter which explores the racial politics…
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…a disproportionate impact here is that for years now, the holy trinity of American professional athletics—football, baseball, and basketball—has seemed largely impervious to the broader movement toward gay and lesbian acceptance in most other sectors of mainstream culture (not for nothing did Kluwe participate in an October radio panel titled “The Gay Jackie Robinson”—as in, professional sports needs one). This imperviousness to progress has seem…
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…lize that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of a false peace. The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even more so the killing of a defenseless and innocent being, will never be able to produce happiness or peace. Indeed how could one claim to bring about peace, the integral development of peoples or even the protection of the environment without defending the life of those who are weakest, beginning with the unb…
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