Religion Dispatches
…ing up. The narrow stairway of our fifth story walk-up is pitch black. Our phones have no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon, after the worst of Sandy has departed for the north, I walk across Avenue B again into the Red zone. Some time during…
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…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…
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…ybody can practice spirituality, with or without religious belief. I don’t really care about Buddhism, but I care tremendously about dharma, which is defined as universal law. I care especially about the aspects of universal law relating to suffering and liberation from suffering. They’re everywhere. I’m not trying to promote Buddhism but dharma. If I’m careful about doing this, it has the potential to unite religions. It has the potential to unit…
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…all time and space? When the Cubit recently reached out to Dr. Reiss for a phone interview, though, his answers were surprising. We discussed his methodology, potential applications of his theory to secularism, and Reiss’s own spirituality as a scientist. How does your theory differ from those of past authors that posit just one or two motivations for religion? Ours is based on scientific research, so we ask people what motivates them. At this poi…
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…representing the Catholic hierarchy or the anti-cult movement. No one has really tried to put a human face on this group. At the same time, I am not an apologist for the Baysiders. I do not endorse their truth claims or agree with their politics. So I am trying to strike a balance. It may be that both Catholic authorities and Baysiders will be take issue with how I told the story. If both sides are equally annoyed then I did my job right. 7. What…
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…w are you going to announce it over social media if you don’t have a smart phone? And smartphones: they are helpful, but they are also limited. I’m working with some of my guides to develop what’s called a WisePhone, and it’s smarter than a smartphone. What are some of the features of the WisePhone? You won’t lose it anymore because it won’t be influenced by gravity, so it won’t fall down the cracks of your couch. It will also be able to tweet or…
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…ver the next few years. It’s going to be much harder work than letters and phone calls to Congress, protests, or meetings with like-minded friends. You can point to the successes of Rev. Barber’s “fusion politics” in North Carolina, but the fact remains that the state GOP passed almost all of their legislative agenda, and has nearly hobbled the incoming Democratic Governor. Ditto, unfortunately, the protest movement that sprang up everywhere after…
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…hing you had to leave out? Early on I decided to focus intently on a small number of newspapers, rather than try to tackle the whole range of black newspapers published before the Civil War. I’m still happy with this decision to go for depth over breadth, but it means that there are lots of papers that I didn’t have a chance to include. I would have really liked to spend some time with Frederick Douglass’ Paper, or the Christian Recorder, but happ…
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…’re facing in the church. So, the real question is the gospel and is Jesus really risen from the dead and does he really have power to hold a diverse group of people together or not? If all we have is a text with no risen savior, a text doesn’t have the power to unite people unless we go into this continual fracturing of how you interpret the text. But, if there’s a risen Jesus who is an active agent, then he has the power actually to hold people…
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…n. If you don’t follow Scientology under the church’s guidance, you’re not really a Scientologist. And that again has led to stagnation, it’s led to a massive drop in members of the church. It has created a church that’s not really built to respond to the immediate global needs of the world’s Scientologists. So now on the flip side you have now the Scientology reform movements, highly individualized versions of Scientology that people are adopting…
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