Religion Dispatches
…use to express our faith become our faith, and predict our actions. So when a child comes home convinced that she is “praying to the flag,” what are we teaching her to believe, about her country, about her religion, and about the real possibility of “liberty and justice for all”?…
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…ac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and the evangelical bestseller The Shack, by William Paul Young, which is sort of a Book of Job meets Criminal Minds and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit novel. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? There are lots of great books on American literature and religion—Tracy Fessenden, Amy Hungerford, and John McClure have done great work. Susan Harding has a…
Read More…t, creationism is never specifically mentioned in the LSEA. Instead, LSEA relies on code language to attack the teaching of evolution and other subjects that Christian fundamentalists hate because it contradicts their narrow religious worldview – reality be damned. The language that was inserted into the LSEA, which the Livingston school district properly understood to mean it could teach creationism, says that the Louisiana State Board of Element…
Read More…forced a floor vote over the objections of the Speaker and Floor Leader. Well, how well do you think that endeared the bill’s supporters to the party leadership? I suppose one has to consider the possibility that Speaker Steele and Floor Leader Dewitt are superhuman in their charity. Perhaps Speaker Steele was utterly unmoved by being insulted in a press release. Perhaps the Republican leadership didn’t so much care that lobbyists were trying to…
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…g but crumbs, dust and ashes.” The water imagery in “Lemonade” is about barely keeping one’s head above water after betrayal, heartbreak and pain. But it’s also about rebirth, renewal, restoration and baptism. There is stunning footage of a group of women in white dresses “wading in the water,” echoing the Christian tradition of baptism but also echoing the African-American ritual of escape from slavery by way of the water. Black women, like Harri…
Read More…ance have worked together to issue a code for how Christians ought to evangelize. No word on how this code effects the use of Chick Tracts. A village in the Philippines celebrates its patron saint, John the Baptist, with a Mud People Festival. Reminds me of my weekend at Bonnaroo 2004. The Pope tweeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism is getting high-tech. A new computer…
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…conference organizers to represent the Anglican Communion. TIME magazine’s Elizabeth Dias found the collaboration between evangelicals, Mormons, and Catholics notable: Skepticism about the other’s faith tends to run deep between Catholics, evangelicals and Mormons. In strict economic terms, the three faiths all compete for followers. They are heavily missionizing, and often they evangelize precisely in ways that distinguish themselves apart from t…
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…n internationally-brokered peace agreement signed in 2005. The Tenth Parallel delves into those places where ecstatic forms of Christianity and Islam have arguably, necessarily, become extremist versions of the faith. But in these “peripheries” along the rough geographical boundary between the religions, Griswold suggests that “exclusive claims on truth tend to call forth their opposites.” In other words, there is hope that extremism will be conte…
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…of assaulting an underage boy. The responses of the accused have varied widely as well. In a few cases—Moore’s most notably—unyielding denial has been the strategy. Those who admitted wrongdoing have done so with varying degrees of specificity and remorse. Garrison Keillor protested his innocence in a statement laden with passive-aggressive humor. These misdeeds can be sorted by type and graded by severity by anyone who wishes. Such cataloguing ma…
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…go any jewelry or makeup, and I’d made sure my dress had long sleeves and fell well below my knees. He was staring at my breasts when he laughed and said, “You’re a Cleavage Queen. I’m going to call you C.Q.” And thus my nickname was born. My body grew hot. I clenched my teeth to hold back tears. I nervously adjusted my dress and went back to my table. I knew I had breasts. He made me aware of them. He made me hate them, and he made me ashamed. Wh…
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