Religion Dispatches
…ave suffered a string of defeats in recent years, potentially reigniting culture wars that many liberals had hoped were all but over. It may not be your father’s Christian right, with new players and new tactics, but it’s still the Christian right and it is more empowered than its been since the glory days of Ronald Reagan….
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…ze sabbath principles to non-Jews? Most importantly: Is Shabbat really the new yoga? Unlike yoga, Shabbat is difficult to commodify. The biggest new sabbath boosters are all nonprofits with social missions. But, certainly, it’s easy to imagine how a slightly exotic practice of mandated rest could, in the right hands, become an interfaith wellness touchstone: feel good through this ancient spiritual wisdom! Shabbat certainly resonates with an afflu…
Read More…rding to the blog PimpPreachers.com, a group of protesters were “Occupying New Birth” and demanding that Long leave the church he has pastored since 1997. At its peak, New Birth boasted 25,000 members, a figure that sank as Long was accused of sexual abuse and assault by young male congregants last year, claims Long settled in secret in May. The Occupy group passed out flyers which read, “The People must rise up and occupy the pulpits, the tithe…
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…rom a non-religious perspective. His outlook is grim. Nature is dangerous. New technologies are creating even more vectors for disaster. And some apocalypse-minded religious groups, Torres argues, might harness those new technologies in order to manufacture their own end-of-days. Plus, there could be aliens. While reading The End, I spent a lot of time wondering whether Torres was prescient or nuts. Much to his credit,Torres is happy to discuss bo…
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…of God returns to Jesus who is being put forward by the Christians as the new temple… the new meeting place between God and human life. So, the transfiguration story is the Christian version of Hanukkah. Once you get that framework in Mark’s gospel, Rosh Hashanah to Passover, then you can begin to see it in Matthew and in Luke. It’s very different because Matthew is very Jewish and Luke is very Gentile-oriented. Luke tells a different sort of sto…
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…JV was born in England in 1611, but almost immediately crossed over to the New World. John Wesley’s Methodism, Charles Wesley’s music, and George Whitefield’s hypnotic sermonizing enjoyed some successes in England but took firm root in New World soil and positively blossomed there. Mary Wollstonecroft’s feminism, as enunciated in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women, was utterly indebted to her own immersion in the religious culture of the…
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…o say, or their parents, or the people who write books and articles in the newspaper and can’t think of anything except the same old things nobody believes in. Peace conferences in Madrid, declarations of principles, Cairo agreements, Washington agreements, road maps. One of these days they will let everyone know what they are planning, and then all the children and older sisters and brothers who want to join them and any parents who think they wi…
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…alking about those alternative identities, and I wanted to talk about your new book, Journey to the Common Good for a little bit. I haven’t read the whole thing, but it seems like the thesis is pretty much that we find those kind of new identities as neighbors in that journey through scripture, through that narrative. Is that right? Walter: That’s right, I think, insofar as the Bible or the Old Testament is telling the tale of covenant, and it rea…
Read More…d reforming the Vatican bureaucracy (35%) should be top priorities for the new pope. This news coincides with an extensive report in the Washington Post on Pope Francis’ reaction (as Archbishop Bergoglio) to the sex abuse scandal in Argentina, which won’t inspire much confidence or optimism about his possible global response to the scandal as pope: Father Julio Cesar Grassi was a celebrity in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires. The young, dynamic, me…
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…us into Caprica’s odd collision of machines, mobsters, and monotheists, a newspaper—with ball scores, stock prices, and local weather makes it all so mundane, masking (as our own newspapers tend to do) the real stakes behind the stories. So, besides reading The Caprican, here’s what I look forward to as the season unfolds: The pull of temptation: How far will Daniel Graystone go to see his daughter again? Watching Eric Stolz is so enjoyable that…
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