Religion Dispatches
…t loss. On Saturday night, a gunman in a central Florida nightclub took 49 mostly young, mostly brown, mostly gay lives. I marvel at the brief biographies of the dead I have seen, how many of them floated to Orlando from distant points as though it were their own personal Samarra. It seems a twisted necessity of God to require their souls so abruptly in a place of joy and refuge, a cruel grace that more than a few died with friends and partners. T…
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…There, she found Ted at the nadir of his professional life, moving between cheap motels with his wife Gayle and two of their five children as he went door-to-door, selling life insurance to strangers. From the pinnacle of evangelical leadership to this? Pelosi later told an interviewer that the story of Haggard’s exile was too compelling in its complexity to pass up. How the mighty had fallen! She brought along her camera, and the Trials of Ted Ha…
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…ish pitted one local Raja against the other based on tribe, religion, or caste—among other factors. The same applies to corporations as they stoke divisiveness in society by indulging in performative activism. They misdirect the attention of people towards who said what and why and away from the issues of better pay, better work-life balance, pension, healthcare benefits and the like. And this is precisely what Hamline University has done by firin…
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…raying for, for what reason. This seemingly innocuous religious exercise last month snowballed into front-page news after police seized more than a million dollars in cash at the Karmapa’s makeshift headquarters near Dharamsala in North India. The Central Government of India, following weeks of investigation, finally cleared Karmapa of any wrongdoing (the money they found had indeed been an accumulation of donations). Speculations abound on what r…
Read More…rongly imagine as a soft verb. There is nothing soft about love. It is the most dangerous action in the world. Because we can’t love, because most of us do know the risks, we stay pre-love and permanently protected. Our armor forgets how to come off. We imagine our security is in bombs and borders when actually it is in risks taken on behalf and towards each other. A community center at Ground Zero is an act of love, hope and forgiveness. We are a…
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…ower for good in a culture in which the poor and relatively powerless have mostly been abandoned (and in which the wealthiest increasingly absent themselves from any kind of conversation about national priorities, in part because they no longer have to foot the bill)? If ending the Bush tax cuts—cuts that were deemed reckless when they were first pushed through in 2001 and 2003—amounts to taking the punch bowl away from the very wealthy, then ma…
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“Institutions do not usually make for the most thrilling reading,” John Fea writes at the beginning of his impressive, massively detailed institutional history of the American Bible Society. Many readers, myself included, might be aware of the critical importance of the ABS in the nineteenth century, but probably thought it had trailed off into insignificance sometime in the twentieth. That’s far from the case. A major accomplishment of Fea’s wor…
Read More…capable of satisfying the needs of its people. In the region, it carries almo*]}*st no geopolitical significance, except a prize that far smaller countries can bid for—a little bit like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, surprisingly irrelevant for its size. The question is: What do we, as Americans, do? I say: Nothing. Not a thing. Enough of wasting our money on governments who do little, if anything for their people, enrich themselves, cultivate…
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…. In situations like that, you find yourself doing lots of work that was almo*]}*st like counter-radicalization; it was definitely counter-disinformation. That’s what you’re helping the journalists with. So I became really informed on that kind of work, and every dark alley that I went down in these war zones or frozen conflict zones, I would find Twitter, Google, and Facebook. You’ve signed yourself in [to the church’s app], you’ve signed in your chi…
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…suring that the institutionalized racism of the seminaries could not be questioned. Among the unexamined powers these six white men hold is the ability to establish the rules on how a conversation will unfold. They can either silence or direct the discourse so perspectives voiced by the disenfranchised can be dismissed as unbiblical. They could feel good about the anti-racist proclamation they made, and even express righteous indignation if accuse…
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