Religion Dispatches
…in the “real” physical environment of the player, as mediated through the phone’s camera. As one player told a reporter: “This is full on escapism, where I’m like ‘let me just go catch some Pokémon and ignore the news.’” What news is she talking about? The murders of Sterling and Castile and the Dallas police officers. She is referring to the news of death. But in a matter of days Pokemon Go has changed our relationship with death. This is new te…
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…ht here in our own backyard? What if we began talking about the increasing number of Black and Latino women, men and children that die at the hands of police every year? As much as non-denominational and evangelical churches zero in on so-called “sins of the flesh” (Galatians 5:19-21), hubris is perhaps the most frequently mentioned sin in the entire Bible. This brings me to my second point. Self-righteousness—the belief that one has exclusive acc…
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…fined as a vagrant. So members always carried five dollars and money for a phone call. Benjamin Zeller, author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, has also noted that Heaven’s Gate members engaged in a lot of self-deprecating humor because they were aware that mainstream society perceived them as crazy. This research led Jones to conclude that a comedy about Heaven’s Gate might not be as inappropriate as it sounds. “I could never make a come…
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…t retaliation and revenge, Somebody said you bumped your head and bled the floor Jumped into a pit of flames and burned to coal Drowned inside the lake outside away you flow And that means the world to me Watch you when you walk inside your house You threw your briefcase all on the couch I plan on creeping through your fuckin’ door and blowin’ out Every piece of your brain until… Dispassionate prayer won’t do, a sermon from the preacher-man won’t…
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…these films openly tackle political issues: movies like Batman and Avenger flicks express ambivalence about the surveillance state, government power, corporate influence, and other charged topics. Other times, narratives onscreen seem to mingle with political narratives offscreen, making war into an unambiguous battle between good and evil. And, more generally, these movies can feel out of place in a society where war seems less and less about bod…
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…rsed by two African-American pastors, including The Rev. Traci Blackmon of Florissant, Missouri, one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement. The other, The Rev. Damond Jackson of Tempe, Arizona said, “John Dorhauer is a person of privilege in the world we live in, but he has used his white, heterosexual, male power to lift those who live in the world of no-communication, the world of the unheard.” “Here I am, a gay, black male, born and…
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…uld not be harmed as long as they gave them all their money and their cell phones. In other villages, they heard, an agreement to convert to Islam and a payment of $7 per month would allow them to survive. But initially they were not given those options. Moreover, his wife was taunted for wearing a Western-style dress, as many Christian women do, so she could not venture outside. They also kept their daughters hidden, fearing they would be capture…
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…with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. #5 : Three Ways to American Beauty by Aaron K. Kerr At the height of secular modernity, when Catholics were opening the windows of Vatican…
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…for shying away from hot-button religious culture war battles, “visited by phone” with Rowan County, Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis yesterday, according to a statement issued by his campaign. “I let her know how proud I am of her for not abandoning her religious convictions and standing strong for religious liberty,” the former pastor, Arkansas governor, and now two-time presidential candidate said in a statement. Arguing that “the Supreme Court c…
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…aking exactly the same language. It’s a very clear set of rules about what flies and what doesn’t fly. These are deep-seated cultural ideas about self and identity, though. I wonder if this is how evolutionary biologists were talking in, say, 1910, before evolution became such a full-blown cultural battleground. I actually think one wouldn’t need neuroscience at all to notice some very basic things, such as that we all come to know and love and ac…
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