Religion Dispatches
…aternal grandfather (a man of the nineteenth century, the son of a polygamist). That portrait hung the living room of my childhood home—a room that had a picture window facing Mount Timpanogos. Is there any book out there you wish you had written? I wish I’d written The Epic of Gilgamesh. It also deals with place-making and the profaning of sacred space. The Mesopotamian epic has all the elements for a timeless meditation on religion and environme…
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…ligion or both and how the US and the UN should relate to the Vatican. Any number of experts on international law suggests that the Vatican does not meet enough of the criteria to be recognized as a state. It has no permanent population; the thousand or so citizens are only citizens as long as they are employed by the Vatican (and of course the fact that there are no more than a dozen women or children among those thousand goes unmentioned.) The V…
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…e grand majority of Mexicans, nearly 84 percent, are Catholic, though that number has been gradually dwindling from 99.5 percent in 1900. It’s hard to know exactly how agreements are cut with Church leaders, but there’s a basic script, says Daptnhe Cuevas Ortiz, director of the Consortium for Parliamentary Dialogue and Equity, a Mexican women’s rights lobbying group. Local Church leaders cozy up to the governor or congressional leaders and say: “l…
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…ped within the constraints of a larger systemic corruption. Franzen’s work deals directly with this systemic corruption and in a way that is both hilarious and highly indignant. Salvation History One also has to wonder how a reviewer might claim that there’s no religion, nothing about the business world, no ethnicity, and no military service. These subjects ripple right through Freedom, though not in un-ironic ways. If anything, for example, Walte…
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…lieves he’s “the most respected, most feared person”), and all those peace deals will help him win a Nobel Peace Prize. That should soften the sentencing in his upcoming penalty phase now that he’s been found guilty of fraud. If you listened closely, you would see how US and global lives are just pawns to the two main establishment parties. Both argued about the Covid response without acknowledging that Covid is still costing the healthcare system…
Read More…Jim Heath asked Romney, “Blunt-Rubio is being debated later this week that deals with allowing employers to ban providing female contraception,” to which Romney provided the above answer. Then a Romney campaign spokesman told TPM, “Regarding the Blunt bill, the way the question was asked was confusing. Governor Romney supports the Blunt Bill because he believes in a conscience exemption in health care for religious institutions and people of faith…
Read More…that in doing so it breached European law. The British government asked a number of countries and all 50 U.S. states to clarify whether the jurisdictions recognize the marriages of same-sex couples who wed in the United Kingdom. Equalities Minister Jo Swinson told the Guardian, “One of the things we committed to do in the coalition agreement is recognising that for gay people who are in a civil partnership or now have got married, and who are tra…
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…ing party. So what indeed are we all left with when spectacle is virtuous because it’s spectacle? Because it’s empty of ethical motives and empty of just consequences? We’re precisely here, where Latino/a economic power can shut down some business deals, but can not muster enough political power to shut down the GOP’s rhetorical war against immigrants. Until Latinos/as grow tired of viewing the spectacle of American politics as outsiders and vote…
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…ult to recall what an unlikely candidate the novel is for that office. “It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of morality,” reads the pronouncement of a member of the infamous Concord (Massachusetts) Library Committee, which banned the book from its shelves shortly after its publication. Ever the shrewd opportunist, Mark Twain seized upon the free publicity, calling it a “tip-top puff” in a letter to a nephew. Americans have mad…
Read More…ed nation that seems to have lost its way. We are proud that your new book deals explicitly with religious themes. You have been leaning in this direction for a long time, and we are glad to see you make your conviction that good religion is essential to good living ever more explicit. Your own intense and transformative religious experience shines through these pages, and we will never disparage the validity of any experience of the sacred. But w…
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