Religion Dispatches
…ame is William James. James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience did not compare Christianity to other religions. In fact, Turner describes it as a piece of “academic intellectual reform.” James “regarded the essential core of religion to lie in inner religious experiences—the ultimate source of and reason for, as he saw it, all religious thought and practice.” He threw out the Protestant categories of texts, beliefs, and institutions. He placed…
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…racy in the Middle East—may be entering a period that some of its citizens compare with the McCarthy era, a time when right-wing activists used government and the press to question the patriotism of Americans who may or may not have been Communist sympathizers. (McCarthy’s Congressional hearings blurred differences among the truly subversive, loyal leftists, and the unfairly accused.) The 1950s Red Scare was the beginning of the end for the Americ…
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…n, fear, and emotion to maintain its undeserved position. Wilkins tries to compare it to two dancers jostling for space on a dance floor, I prefer to think of it as one dancer, humanity, afflicted with lice, religion, and twitching and squirming unpleasantly while struggling with a persistent parasite. 3. Just Say No… To Louisiana The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), one of the nation’s leading scientific societies, took the…
Read More…ial candidate Mike Huckabee traveling to Nebraska with the tea partiers to compare him to Judas. Clearly looking for religious cover, Casey issued a press release Friday touting the support of leaders like Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, Evangelicals for Social Action’s Ron Sider, and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference’s Samuel Rodriguez. Is that what we need, though — making a religious stamp of approval essential political cover? The…
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…I know the the popularity of punk, amongst other genres, outside the Anglophone world. I think Mike’s book clearly speaks to a lot of people, but as fiction there is a comfortable level of distance. You are actually making the music, and that’s really the tension I want to explore. It’s one thing to utilize the genre, it’s another to inject it with themes related to Islam. I will be honest and say that I am surprised at how well your lyrical cont…
Read More…cially in connection with electoral politics? I’m not in any way trying to compare Mormonism with Islam, but the same thing has happened to both religions. People who have a very short-sighted view of religious freedom assume that a minority religion can be attacked in a way that a majority religion cannot be. I say a short-sighted view because if any religion is vulnerable to that kind of attack, every religion is. Our interest—people have a hard…
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…gian[s], puts [them] on par with Monkeys.” In a later entry, he demanded: “Compare, the Fuegian & Orangutan, & dare to say difference so great.” As for the vaunted “mind of man,” Darwin concluded, it “is no more perfect, than instincts of animals.” Human thought itself (like animal instincts) he attributed to brain structure, chiding himself “oh you Materialist!” for thinking so. While Darwin avoided commenting publically on human evolution, his m…
Read More…irresponsible journalists, obscure that reality. Then Joe Nocera tries to compare Tea Party radicals to Islamic radicals, as if this makes the comparison more powerful—and his analysis more insightful. But the Tea Party is not foreign; it is homegrown. Don’t make this foreign. Don’t end with a casual reference to “suicide vests,” as if by making the Tea Party seem Muslim or Arab, they are therefore easier to disparage. Don’t pin this on Muslims,…
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…of the motion picture and our collective visual connections to mass death, compare, for example, these images: A close inspection should easily indicate which images were “live” on September 11, and which were staged, but it is movies such as Godzilla (top left, from 1998) and Armageddon (bottom right, from 1998) and many more, that have displayed similar New York City destruction, and made this collective vision of exploding buildings so muc…
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…ational Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, who has since gone on to compare health care reform to King Herod, give the benediction at the Conservative Political Action Conference, frame issues in spiritual warfare terms, and speak at Gov. Rick Perry’s prayerfest, The Response. If someone like Rodriguez is considered a moderate, then Sutton is right: Rodriguez has not been interested in seeking “common ground” on abortion since being made th…
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