Religion Dispatches
…iscourse. Sure. He’s racist and sexist. I get that. Is this a problem? You bet! Does it make me cringe? Of course! But is it unfamiliar? Hell no! Racism and sexism are as American and foundational to our cultural make-up as democracy. Imus simply reflects America’s contradictions. What comes to mind for me is the greater problem: the perennial closeting of race and sex. Let’s all say this together: RACISM AND SEXISM EXIST AND ARE INTEGRAL PARTS OF…
Read More…l Christians. Republican voting gays made their case this past week on Michelangelo Signorile’s XM radio show. Jim, in Lexington, Kentucky told Signorile that he voted a straight Republican ticket to “send a message” to the Democrats for not doing enough to advance LGBT rights. “I want to see the Democrats take a big beating like the Republicans did,” Jim said. “so maybe in the future they’ll wake up and start doing what they promised.” “But do yo…
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…s that unseen forces were conspiring to control the world. This was ultimately a religious, not political, idea. A similar case can be made about Christine Weick. At first glance you might consider her a right-winger, but a lot of what she says—that evil corporations are manipulating us with products and advertising—could have come out the mouth of anti-corporate leftist. For Weick, such political labels are probably beyond the point. What is the…
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…isit the transgressions of Israel upon him I will also visit the altars of Beth-el: [Bet-is House] [el– is GOD] and the horns [trumpets] of the altar shall be cut off, and fall to the ground. *When the trumpet fell off from Moroni on salt lake temple today.” While this sounded reasonable to many, the following day, several Latter-day Saint scholars of Hebrew had criticized the faulty reading of the passage and pointed out that horns referred to th…
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…e question of how much more deserving you were, of whether either of us, a freelance scribbler or a Wall Street investor, deserved to occupy a whole other financial galaxy than the attendant who took care of our ailing parents, or the farmer who produced our milk, or the bouncer who got shot breaking up a fight in a bar where one of our kids just happened to be having a drink. But the bit about Morgan and Stanley belonging to a lesser order of hum…
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…l world with adolescence hints at this as a kind of rite of passage—a time betwixt and between childhood and full adult responsibilities. Much like game worlds, it occurs within a space where actions have been stripped of real-world consequences, though from the first, we discover that Zoe has discovered ways to make what happens in this space count: she’s turned to it as a space of religious conversion and political activism. One of the recurring…
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…y daily responsibilities or activities? I won’t be able to resist entering the fray when the beta version is released today, if only to see how we as a culture we are trying to figure out the relationship between play, theology, and performance of belief. If you’re curious to learn of my progress, you can follow my tweets at www.twitter.com/godwired….
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…her than try to change God’s standards” (1-14-08). 6.) TOP TEN COMPARISONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND DENTISTRY: Between Google ads for “oral sedation” and “dental fear,” blogger Mark Wright writes thoughtfully about many things. On this list he points out, helpfully, that “Both Dentistry and Religion benefit financially from your sins” and reminds us that “In Religion there is the promise of Heaven. In Dentistry there is only Hell.” 7.) BOOKLIST’S TOP…
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…cloning is another approach to the apparently never-ending quest for humans to be able to reproduce when they can’t in other ways, why is it different than the other “non-natural” approaches Americans already use en masse? Scholars of religion like Michael Broyde in Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism, using ideas like those raised in our experiment, have already been asking these questions and coming up with some surprising answers, promising in…
Read More…f II Corinthians 6:14… The Mormon Church is now rejoicing over the public relations success that these undiscerning evangelical leaders have handed the Mormon Church by uniting with Glenn Beck in the two events that were promoted as spiritual. Cameron, known also for his part on the television series Growing Pains and more recently nicknamed Banana-man (along with Ray Comfort) for the anti-evolution DVDs that became the source of tremendous intern…
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