Religion Dispatches
…te the backstory there. Haley’s use of the phrase “Catholic ghetto” is not cheap hyperbole, if you consider the history of Catholics in the United States. The US Catholic hospital system grew up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; largely under the care of women’s religious orders, and largely to serve the poor. (Read about a few of the women who helped build Catholic health care.) The surrounding cultural landscape could be pr…
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…r the children of atheist lesbian couples are simply not welcome here. The cheap paperback Easter stories read by Sanders and Conway—no doubt ordered the day before from Amazon Prime—had nothing to do with teaching, or welcoming, or even celebrating a Christian holiday (inappropriate as that itself would have been at a White House event). As this administration did with its craven and phony defense of “Merry Christmas” as if it were an endangered…
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…homes and factories with new supplies of electric power that would be “too cheap to meter.” In 1957 Walt Disney even released a movie titled Our Friend, the Atom. Looking back now, it’s quite easy to see why the happy talk from Ike and Walt failed to quell our nuclear nightmares. In somewhat the same way that climate change denialism functions today, the Atoms for Peace campaign merely divided public opinion, allowing some to sleep easy and the mo…
Read More…gths, and the great expense of a high-power law firm, to try to score some cheap political points on the backs of same-sex couples.” I suppose Boehner can pander to the religious right and continue to defend “traditional” marriage, but I think it’s fair to ask why—when jobless rates continue to hover near 10 percent—which issue may be most important to God: how people arrange their intimate relationships, or how we feed and care for those families…
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…ons.” And so Brooks underscores what he calls the emotionally harmonizing “spiritual GPS” in our strange human brains. The lines between science, spirituality, storytelling, politics, and Washington-insider social values are fuzzy in Brooks’ book. This may be one of the things that makes his analysis inspiring; though it’s also a bit confusing, perhaps even dizzying. In his New York Times review, philosopher Thomas Nagel chides Brooks for believin…
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…in monks’ dwellings) but why the Indian government, host to Tibet’s exiled spiritual leadership, chose to target him. For many observers, the widely-hyped investigation was an indication of the intensifying strain between India and China regarding Tibet, and an ominous suggestion of trouble to come for the Tibetan culture-in-exile once the Dalai Lama, now 75, is gone. – The Eds. The birth of a scandal I was there in Bodhgaya in the winter of 2006,…
Read More…on-Muslims to support those ideals while transcending easy stereotypes and cheap fear-mongering. We should therefore pause in our reactions and ask ourselves; perhaps an Islamic revolution in Egypt is not de facto a bad thing. Finally, I’m reminded of Karen Armstrong’s description of the historical mission Muslims are tasked with: “In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical missio…
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…ad upon the growing faith that social networking can miraculously generate spiritual orientation, evading with sacrilegious humor where one expects guidance. Behold: crowdsourced Catholicism. Such a system demands a temporal rather than eternal perspective. On December 20th, I registered for the Penance application, then only nine days old, and my reflections concern a view of the entire system as I documented it on the 28th. At that point, only 1…
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I read Going Rogue on an airplane while jetting across the continent to visit the author’s church, Wasilla Bible Church. I remember pulling the book surreptitiously out of my satchel and opening the cover with some mixture of dread and resignation, figuring that I might someday be able to make a case that the hours spent reading the book should count as a credit toward Purgatory. The autobiography was, as I suspected, pretty insubstantial, filled…
Read More…of the jostle and the necessity of the inconvenience. But still, I would draw the line: jostle there, but not in the shops to buy cheap token souvenirs made in China….
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