Religion Dispatches
…e mark of a person of the year. While I like Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap….
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…ve a COVID vaccination because they’ve heard that the shots can affect fertility, or that they’re manufactured with aborted fetuses, taking the objections mentioned above and putting them on steroids. Given that context, it would certainly be worthwhile to evaluate Novavax’s potential against the determined (and often covert) opposition to any kind of vaccination in some of the very communities in which it might be supposed to have great appeal. I…
Read More…will come out as “You’re a nifty skink!” And who doesn’t love skinks? 6. Willpower! Is magical! 7. Find an accountability partner! Every time you are tempted to sexually harass a stranger, call your partner and make a confession. 8. Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it every time you think about harassing a woman! Rubber bands are cheap – mere cents. Why, you could snap yourself with a rubber band more-or-less constantly for the next…
Read More…with palms toward the black stone, and recite “bismi-Lah, Allahu Akbar laa ilaha illa-Allah.” Then raise your right hand as if in greeting and bring it back to kiss. If you are close enough to the stone, you’re supposed to kiss it. If you cannot kiss it, you should touch it with the right hand; if not, then just wave and kiss the hand. People also will touch it with an item of clothing and then kiss that, if they are close enough. So we started ou…
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…unpacking of these points, and we will be hindered in the fight against Christian nationalism until elite journalists, pundits, and filmmakers are willing to take that risk….
Read More…uman being (at least not after the tender age when he realized that his family was rich because crime pays). Here we see the white Protestant abandonment of the rule of law and the rule of reason in full hideous display. Which of course is different from saying that all white Protestants are a lost cause. But by now it is painfully clear that far too many are willing to throw both law and reason overboard for the sake of preserving (say it with me…
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…Rather, I simply want to know what they know. How about a debate in which Hillary and Obama each explain how Revelation will help them make decisions? It’s time to take political faith seriously. And if doing so strikes you as invasive, unseemly, and irrelevant to the job the candidates are seeking—well, then, it’s really time to take faith seriously, including its uses and abuses in a democracy where piety and cynicism have long been comfortable…
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…But Dylann Roof’s act was not extraordinary evil, it was quite ordinary evil, the evil deeply embedded in the racial architecture of America. This young man yielded to the mind bending incoherent frustration born of whiteness, a frustration that has always misdirected its anger at black people first, and then other people of color and Jewish people, all of whom are imagined as thwarting the full achievement of the possession of whiteness and the…
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…an ogre. It makes Jesus a sadomasochistic victim and it makes you and me guilt-laden. Guilt never produces life. If guilt is your message, the best you can produce is a hidden righteousness. You repress your negative feelings in public and you pass this guilt on because it’s intolerable. I think what we’ve turned Christianity into is a sick religion and it comes out politically. What do you think about the Occupy movement? Finally, this negativity…
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…on, fortunately, offers lots of things people can do that honor God even while raising a bit of Cain for man. Form organizations and networks around your concerns. Hone your position in the academy. Hold vigils. Go to meetings, volunteer to help, and speak out when you do. Pray and fast. And repeat. If you have to, start praying in your church as a group and refuse to leave. (Sitting on top of pillars was a favorite attention-getter for ancient sa…
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