Religion Dispatches
…lboard in Las Vegas, Nevada featuring two strips of bacon hiteheadearing a Santa hat and a Star of David respectively. This billboard’s slogan reads “Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from the 13,000 Atheists and Skeptics at the United Church of Bacon,” replete with the tagline, “Bacon is our God because bacon is real.” Since its inception during a meeting at Penn Jillette’s house in 2010, the church proclaims to welcome all who love the smell of…
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…a meager substitute for the direct experience of a sunset on the beach at Santa Monica, I no longer imagine that the biblical hodgepodge of primitive tribal taboo and secondhand revelation captures the wonder and full meaning of the cosmos as it unfolds all around (and through) me. But like Scott Renfroe, Chris Buttars, Sally Kern and their tens of millions of fellow travelers, I still clutch old habits of mind that cloud over creation and that t…
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…which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism. … Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses [sic], mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal.” Donohue seized on the incident to charge that Wal-Mart had purged “Christmas” from its web site, which he called “discrimination” practiced by “cultural fascists.” He called for a boycott of Wal-Mart in mid-Nov…
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…Arabic numbers are called ‘Indian numbers,’ and why, in the West, ‘Indian numbers’ are called ‘Arabic numbers.’ In India they’re just known as numbers. No matter what they’re called, I think we can all agree they make life a lot easier. 2. Coffee Muslims invented coffee, and coffee is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies. At best it goes cold. In fact, one of the reasons coffee took off is because religious Muslims preferred the beverage for…
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…e Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the morphing of St. Nicholas into Santa Claus. Dickens’ famous story did not reflect the Christmas of his time but instead was an attempt to resurrect and reinvent Christmas, and it was incredibly successful. A Christmas Carol contains very little direct reference to religion and says nothing about a baby in a manger—but it does promote a spirit of giving and care for others that can be embraced by almost a…
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…me. I did just one thing yesterday, which is that at noon I walked down to Santa Monica Boulevard to march for a bit (it’s Gay Pride Weekend in Los Angeles, and I live in West Hollywood). It’s been years since I actually marched at a Pride event, given my loathing for the way Pride celebrations have been commercialized everywhere. But today I needed to find my marching boots. Later I took a couple of wordless drinks with old friends as police and…
Read More…from the Catholic Church. There have been protest marches, particularly in Santa Cruz, the conservative city that is Bolivia’s economic motor. Writing in Bolivian newspaper El Diario, theologian Gary Antonio Rodrígues Alvarez even warned that the concept of “hate,” as used to define crimes committed against gays because of their sexuality, is “highly dangerous.” Romania: Court approves marriage initiative backed by US religious right groups The U….
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…Collins August 2016 Mayfield and I met this summer at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, where I was teaching a class on spiritual writing. My own experiences with missionary stories as a Catholic had been colored by the bleak history of Catholic missions in California, where I grew up, and where scores of Native Americans died due to the missionary efforts of the recently canonized Junipero Serra, among others. More recently, Catholic missionary effo…
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…,” an outgrowth of a May workshop sponsored by Ford and the Center for Emerging Worlds at the University of California, Santa Cruz. …
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…of Naples, for example, a priest was recently suspended from the parish of Santa Maria degli Angeli over claims he held gay orgies and used Internet sites to recruit potential partners whom he paid for sex. … In the northern city of Padua, a 48-year-old priest, the Rev. Andrea Contin, is facing defrocking as well as judicial proceedings amid accusations he had up to 30 lovers, some of whom he took to a swingers’ resort in France. … Francis has fre…
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