Religion Dispatches
…ields during patrols in West Bank villages. “There must be a reasonable explanation for what is happening in the Gaza Strip,” we tried to tell ourselves in December 2008 and January 2009, when confronted by news coverage of innocent civilians mauled by Israeli attacks, a UN school destroyed, and the rest of the terrible carnage resulting from Israel’s attack. “There must be a good reason why all of those people had to die or get maimed, why the Ga…
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…the only way to defend themselves is to beat the living crap [out of assailants]…. There’s a lot of desolation.” Lanoue clarifies, “Anger is useful insofar as it inspires a self-defender to overcome the paralysis of fear. But for that action to be effective, the anger must be filtered through the parts of the brain that govern self-control, reason, even empathy.” Effecting that filtration in a nation of 1.24 billion will likely take longer than t…
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…America will send the first woman to the moon and be the first nation to plant a flag on Mars). Trump drove his speech to a close with more secularized and—despite references to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman—racist nationalist appeals to “pioneers,” “settl[ing] the New World,” and “the beautiful, beautiful Alamo.” This language of “national greatness,” it’s worth noting, may be regarded as the expression of a type of political religion, a…
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…hile that corner of the night sky near NGC 6809 is still pulsing out prime numbers. –Rome, December, 2055 _________ The article that may one day be written about religious responses to E.T. will of course bear little resemblance to the fiction above. But, religion aside, the possibility of confirming alien life is less remote than you might think. On May 21, 2014, Dan Werthimer, scientific director of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life) at…
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…ned at their hands and their hands alone, from within their system. *** On December 9th, 2014, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released a summary of its report on the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The report revealed little new—the gruesome details it outlines were largely publically known already. Detainees were water-boarded for days on end, placed in coffin-like boxes filled with insects, and subjected to force-feeding and freezing…
Read More…be offering positive alternatives to the extremes of excessive spending or December seclusion. Spend your time and money assisting others! Over the past few years participating congregations have donated millions of dollars to provide clean water in developing countries. Similarly, other congregations have donated time and resources to local charities within their local community. When one considers the alarming rates of un- and underemployment, h…
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…staged events in Albania, Greece, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Scotland. In a 2010 meeting, Lance Wallnau prophesied that Jan-Aage Torp “would bring together people in the activity of heaven.” And like the biblical figure, Nehemiah, Torp was called to “rebuild walls and gates around cities and nations,” and told that God would give him “authority with gatekeepers” (e.g., influential leaders). During an EAL event in 2022, Texas Apostle-Prop…
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…rating Base Freedom. But two weeks later the administration announced its plan to keep indefinitely the entire Camp Victory complex, which has five large bases in Baghdad, and Camp Prosperity and Camp Union III, which are located near the new American Embassy in the Green Zone. There are more announcements of this sort to come. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is already saying we will need to keep some military forces in Iraq beyond December 2011,…
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…issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have cell phones and be on the Internet? If they forbid them, that’s going to be very tough, and if they permit them, they’re going to introduce a huge new force into the world of child rearing and education. Religious education is going to have to make some drastic shifts. And it’ll be interesting to see how it works. This is still hinged on belief. This next generation can be Musli…
Read More…ands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic priorities as a cheap publicity stunt to get hippies in the pew. He completely misunderstands Francis’ speech to Congress as plumping for liberal values—and I’m not entirely sure he gets that Martin Luther King wasn’t a Catholic. On and on it goes. Douthat snipes at “a liberalism that thinks it can impose meaning on a cosmos whose sound and fury signifies nothing on its own,” without bothe…
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