Religion Dispatches
…y fond words for John Hagee, joining the ranks of shortsighted Jews who refuse to see the profound crackpot anti-Semitism lurking beneath the Texas pastor’s support for Israel. My Jesus Year therefore represents something of an odd chapter in the history of Jews and church, but one that may very well be indicative of the forces at play in our time. Clearly, if even a nice Orthodox boy can get permission to do it, the act of a Jew entering into a C…
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…urt… the last October she would sit on the bench. RBG’s collar donated to Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. In the wake of her death, the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv announced that Ginsburg had donated one of her collars to the museum last March; it will appear in the new core exhibit opening there this winter. ““She was a righteous person,” Shula Bahat, a museum representative, told NPR. “She was totally dedicated to the values…
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…ements as well. In short, we knew nothing about this shady arrangement because Congress has refused to ask. Churches are financial and informational black holes. They file no financial information with the government. Nothing. The same is true for many church auxiliary organizations, like Ensign. Other charities, those that are not church-affiliated, file annual disclosures (a Form 990 or the like) with the IRS that track every penny in and out of…
Read More…r when any member of the Catholic hierarchy spoke, are now talked about in coded language. For the average American, Catholic or not, listening to him speak at the White House on Wednesday morning, the take away would have been that the pope was very concerned about immigrants and the environment. While he did talk about the U.S. bishops’ pet issue of protecting “religious liberty,” for those not keyed into the ongoing culture war battles over acc…
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…ely and help people think imaginatively? Or does he focus on impieties and promote the virtues of paraphernalia like the dress code and the mandatory length of facial hairs? If the imam is as wise as the religious leader in the Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, it will be a huge step up. Mosque committees share their burden of responsibility too. Often they appoint preachers by applying the lowest and cheapest standard; theological div…
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…ly Research Council, the FRC Action PAC, and which it is running against House Democratic incumbents Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-8), Betsy Markey (CO-4), Carol Shea-Porter (NH-1), John Boccieri (OH-16), and Tom Perriello (VA-5). In a press release about the $125,000 ad buy, FRC highlighted its campaign against Perriello, a Democrat representing a swath of central and southwest Virginia who was once considered a poster child for the Democrats’ faith out…
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…. I should not have to worry if someone will take my children from me because I am too controversial right now. I REFUSE to keep watching and reading of children taking their own lives because “good Christians” look the other way while their own children bully babies to death. UPDATE #6: Via Believe Out Loud’s blog, Hollie at the blog Satchel and Tea writes to Sojourners about why she decided not to subscribe to its magazine: “you don’t share my…
Read More…nd, at the time under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee for misuse of tax-deductible donor funds, claimed Huckabee was on his side because, in Huckabee’s words, Copeland was “trying to get prosperity to the people and they’re [Congress is] trying to take it away from ’em.” Such efforts to win the hearts of televangelists (and by extension, their audiences) date back to the early days of the first George H.W. Bush presidential campaign….
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…nversation about the appropriation of Buddhist practices is difficult, because as the tradition spread—from the Indian subcontinent, and across the globe—it always adapted to host cultures. Buddhism absorbed Chinese religion when it spread to China, Tibetan religion in Tibet, and so on. But mindfulness—what we think of as “meditation,” as opposed to prayer or ceremonial observance, for example—does have deep roots in the tradition. The Pali word s…
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…empathy occurs at a time when Obama has chosen a woman for the court. Because empathy is often improperly defined in terms of feeling and caring, it is more closely associated with women (who are, according to social prejudices, more emotional). This bias is used to question women’s ability to make effective, tough and fair-minded decisions. In comparison, so called “rational” approaches to adjudication tend to be associated with men, who are sup…
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