Religion Dispatches
…ere a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? The DaVinci Code. Now, that’s a profitable reworking of Christian history. I wouldn’t have to worry about paying for my daughter’s college education. Seriously, I wish I could have written Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those magisterial books about history that has become part of history. Books like that happen once in a generation. Sigh. What’s your next book? It is on…
Read MoreToday, the Church of England came several steps closer to achieving women’s equality within the church. The national assembly voted, after only two hours of debate, to move legislation in support women bishops to the revision committee stage. People on both sides of the debate have met the advancement with varying levels of apprehension. Voices on the side of women’s ordination in the Church of England believed that the legislation did not go far…
Read More…n of microchips, which certain voters equated with the Mark. In Russia, barcodes are the chief object of millennial paranoia, with the three extended lines of the barcode equated with the number ‘6’. (This is slightly more plausible than the American conspiracy theory that the logo for Monster Energy Drink is not a claw mark, but three misshapen Hebrew letter ‘Vav’s, which hold a numerical value of 6). Some Russians apparently remove the barcodes…
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…f which do happen to wear (typically small) crucifixes—and thus the visual code aimed its sights more narrowly on undesirable religious minorities, while at the same time allowing the government to proclaim the even-handedness of its approach. But whatever the actual intentions of the government, the deployment of this category of the ‘permitted sign’ wonderfully epitomized a much larger and more longstanding liberal project to (re)construct mode…
Read More…only the latest wave of an Islamic ‘tsunami’ sweeping the globe.” Oh, and look! The Brotherhood has learned its tactics from Bill Ayers and Code Pink. Don’t you love living in a fact-free world?…
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…ld step of drawing down one million dollars from the Diocesan Endowment to promote the ‘no’ case,” he said. Davies told the gathering that “the stakes are high and the cost is high”. “Yet the cause is just and it is a consequence of our discipleship to uphold the gift of marriage as God has designed it — a creation ordinance for all people. By so doing, the wisdom of God is made manifest.” … “I believe that a change in the definition of marriage i…
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…ation practices took place in a community of aspirants abiding by a common code of conduct and observing a shared set of rituals. While deemed necessary for liberation, meditation practices like mindfulness were not sufficient. The accompanying rules and relationships were just as important. Modern-day mindfulness takes this twentieth-century shift to lay meditation one step further, sanctioning meditation as a technique developed in the midst of…
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…atives immediately attacked Obama’s requirement, stating that empathy was “code” for a judge who would legislate from the bench (a position satirized by one observer who noted that Jesus himself, a noted proponent of empathy, would have been opposed by the GOP as well). They’ve taken a fresh new idea and wrapped it in the lexicon of the same old culture wars. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell stated that Obama wanted a judge with “perceived s…
Read More…ples can get married here.” Rodriguez reports that part of the campaign is promotion of “The Outing, the only matchmaking festival in the world for same-sex couples, which is part of the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival that starts at the end of August and runs into October.” Every year since the late 19th century, the small spa town in the Irish community of County Clare, famous for its mineral-water springs, cozy pubs, classically colorful shop…
Read More…Christians are better than Christianity. They employ their personal moral code, choosing the moral morsels from the Bible that square with their contemporary sensibility. The Bible does not portray Jesus as a liberal powerhouse. Or at least, not solely as the man liberal Christians claim. We need look no further than hell to prove this point. Americans possess an unparalled degree of religious liberty, but Jesus promises eternal torture if they e…
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