Religion Dispatches
…to their institution and the Christian community as a whole.” On their Web site, the Christian Security Network says that it’s “a national organization dedicated to the advancement of security, safety, and emergency planning”: We address everyday risks such as lawsuits and liability, medical emergencies, crime, disasters like fire and destructive weather, violent situations, “active shooters,” and lost or abducted children; further we believe that…
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…Alexander Jenner, is he still alive?” So I looked up his name. There was a site devoted to people who played on this label, Remington Records. It had bios of various people and didn’t mention any death date. I wrote to the person in Holland who put this site together and said, “Do you happen to know how to reach Alexander Jenner, is he still alive?” He gave me a postal address for Jenner in Vienna, so I wrote a four-page letter telling him how muc…
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…ich included both on- and offline dimensions. Visitors to the church’s Web site are notified of multiple religious services but are also invited to explore online “Stations of the Cross,” where they can click on black and white photos of a recent staging of the Stations of the Cross in Manhattan to reveal scriptural passages, prayers, and meditative music. Interestingly, with this digital Stations presentation, user interactivity is elevated to an…
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More and more, serious business is being done through Twitter, a Web site with a most unserious-sounding name. On Twitter, you tweet out a tweet, which everyone who is following your tweets can see. True to the name and its accompanying noun/verb, the site’s architecture seemingly confines it to the trivial. Every tweet must be under 140 characters (which this paragraph has already long exceeded). Even its built-in instructions emphasize triviali…
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…gurus, followers, and even church services. Check out Richard Dawkins’ Web site and you could be looking at the Web site of any televangelist suffering from an acute messianic delusion. Add a dash of hucksterism, replete with scads of merchandise, including a “Scarlet A pin” to be worn by the faithful to identify them as followers and to provoke “conversations” with the uninitiated leading to their conversion to atheism. A secular “Maharishi” of a…
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…s settler militias and security for West Bank settlements. Im Tirtzu’s Web site calls for “a second Zionist revolution.” That begs the question: who and what will be overthrown? At the very least, the flap over Chazan has trained a spotlight on two American nonprofits that are channeling millions of dollars to support two very different visions of Israel. Sounds like a story in the making. But it’s also salient that Israel—long heralded as the onl…
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…pedia as an alternative to Wikipedia. The nation’s sixth most frequently visited Web site had, he felt, become dominated by liberal and anti-Christian bias. Now Schlafly has a new project: rewriting the Bible to free it from liberal bias. The new translation will be free of “emasculated” and “dumbed-down” language as well as “liberal wordiness.” So-called “later-inserted liberal passages” will be deleted entirely. All of these changes will be mad…
Read More…top headlines. Jill Stanek? Again, no mention in the top headlines and a site search turned up nothing. World Magazine, which is currently taking a critical stance toward the National Association of Evangelicals over the latter’s acceptance of a grant from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy? Again, my site search turned up nothing. It could be that nobody’s gotten around to writing about it yet, I guess. Or, it could…
Read More…hey are simply an over-the-top parody group of hate groups. Even their Web site at godhatesfags.com looks like a deft parody of hate sites. In fact, compare WBC’s Santa attack to a similar piece over at Landover Baptist, an openly stated religious parody site. If WBC’s goal is to turn America against gays and lesbians, Iraq veterans and now Santa, they have been woefully incompetent. However, they do tend to foster more tolerance, and even some ac…
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…ters, L’Enfant had no plans to extend the Mall westward beyond the current site of the Washington Memorial. (The Lincoln Memorial is built on landfill.) More importantly, throughout the nineteenth-century the Mall existed as a carefully managed urban forest, a patchwork of trees and plants that were the envy of visitors from throughout the world. What changed in the early twentieth century was a shift from thinking about the Mall as set of public…
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