Religion Dispatches
…ut the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedom to own a gun are at odds. Someone will have to win and someone will have to lose. I mean this quite literally. The only way to have meaningful gun control will be to vote people out of…
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…ation of donations). Speculations abound on what really triggered the raid last month, and there are various conspiracy theories, though it now appears that local politics played a key role. After the money was seized, all the key figures in the state, including the head of the police, were seen on television, joined forces and declared him guilty long before the investigation was over. Many of them said he was a “Chinese plant” in India and a “Ch…
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…es, I know, it’s just fantasy, right? But your kids are going to be in my classroom later, and I am going to have to deconstruct this mess. Note: spoilers ahead. If you want to see the mess, stop here. The New Orleans and the Louisiana Bayou that Disney’s writers have concocted for viewer pleasure (and my ultimate displeasure) surrounds the story of Tiana, a hardworking African American young woman, and Prince Naveen, a handsome ne’er-do-well prin…
Read More…ose reading of Scripture is cramped, at best. Seen in this context, it’s a cheap dodge for liberals within the UMC to blame churches and delegates from the Global South for the vote to retain (and even heighten) the denomination’s ban on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the Un…
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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…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…
Read More…ce?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…
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…ion, and economic turmoil in their home countries. They have come in large numbers, many of them undocumented, settling among poor South Africans who often resent their presence. While the situation confronting immigrants and poor natives in the United States is not as dire, there are clear signs of simmering tensions around the issue of undocumented immigration, particularly in poor rural communities and around towns that witnessed factory shutdo…
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…ny cases, the decision to migrate was not only heart-wrenching, but one of last resort; the only way in which the immigrants’ families could survive. They may also learn about the often devastating effects of immigration on families and communities in sending countries. This is a far cry from the vision of the immigrant as an unscrupulous freeloader. In multicultural/multiethnic congregation, immigrants, for their part, can learn about US civic cu…
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…ictim he could denigrate. He united all the Germans against the Jews. It’s cheap politics, but we still have people who know how to do that. It doesn’t lead to anything but destruction. How can reeducating ourselves about the Bible—and educating the non-religious about the Bible—help us regain the center? One of my hopes for this book is that it will provide a textbook to talk about the Bible in a new way. A local pastor doesn’t have to actually s…
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