Religion Dispatches
…New Life Church’s World Prayer Center once… …I would like to do that. It’s cheap and they have hotel rooms—prayer closets, they call them. Or take the Crystal Cathedral. Right. Philip Johnson, who was a leading postmodern architect, designed the Crystal Cathedral. So what’s going on? As these systems become more complex, they become more volatile. As they become more volatile, you have to figure out how, in the economic realm, to manage risk. You…
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…on deteriorated with the beginning of the second intifada in fall 2000 and cheap Palestinian labor became increasingly inaccessible due to curfews and roadblocks designed to prevent terrorist attacks. And they came, creating in the process a mosaic of cultural diversity. Most of Israel’s foreign workers (30 percent) came from Thailand but many migrated from the Philippines (18%), and from China (10%), Nepal (6%) and Romania (5%). They were willing…
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…er border security, we forget that such measures have grossly inflated the number of undocumented immigrants residing in the US. Half of these used to return to Mexico annually, but researchers now estimate that only one-fourth do so today; stricter border enforcement measures since 1994 have staunched the cyclical flow of the return home of millions. The crisis of 12 million “illegal” immigrants is one of our own creation. The missing clergy coul…
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…tepping up the pace of deportations of those same persons. Why? Because of cheap politics and the sneer. And also because people of faith have started fighting among themselves instead of working to resolve the problems. We should be in charge of helping politicians have the political cover they need to do the extravagantly right and realistic thing. Consensus is possible if people are willing to give and take; to be a little less convinced that t…
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…story of right-wing defeat and liberalism ascendant doesn’t unravel like a cheap suit on a blue dog Dem voting more money for the war. “Fundamentalism” is bigger than Ted Haggard, bigger than Jerry Falwell, bigger than the president, who, if defectors from his regime are to be believed, has lost all but a sliver of his religion. It’s bigger and older and more enduring than the political coalition currently called the “Christian Right,” soon to be…
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…y well. So Disney’s take on life in New Orleans and the bayou is at best a cheap commercial ploy, and at worst, a revisionist religious and racist nightmare. Yes, I know, it’s just fantasy, right? But your kids are going to be in my classroom later, and I am going to have to deconstruct this mess. Note: spoilers ahead. If you want to see the mess, stop here. The New Orleans and the Louisiana Bayou that Disney’s writers have concocted for viewer pl…
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…ut the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedom to own a gun are at odds. Someone will have to win and someone will have to lose. I mean this quite literally. The only way to have meaningful gun control will be to vote people out of…
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…ny analyst and former official with a view on Tibet and China could fire a cheap shot. The Indian government’s assertiveness vis-à-vis China is refreshing (though achieving it at the expense of refugees and Buddhist monks who fled China at 14 to get an education smacks of bad taste.) The affair has also unsettled the sentiments of those living in India’s predominantly Buddhist Himalayan region, which separates China from India. There were large pr…
Read More…ast two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wage…
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…aafa 21 quotes from a letter in which she wrote of the need for a “simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.” These words are noxious, but it’s also important to put them…
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