Religion Dispatches
…in the “real” physical environment of the player, as mediated through the phone’s camera. As one player told a reporter: “This is full on escapism, where I’m like ‘let me just go catch some Pokémon and ignore the news.’” What news is she talking about? The murders of Sterling and Castile and the Dallas police officers. She is referring to the news of death. But in a matter of days Pokemon Go has changed our relationship with death. This is new te…
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…shooting. I spent a full hour, numb with terror, refreshing the news on my phone and waiting to be reassured that the violence had been contained. The (unarmed) door guards at the school’s drop-off line know my daughter’s tricks; how she likes to stall and take her sweet time. And I watch her dance away into the little building where she builds her dreams and plays with her friends every day. I can hold it together until I drive away, but then it…
Read More…Jewish heritage of my wife of 38 years,” he wrote in an email. Later in a phone interview, he said his wife was not a practicing Jew but “ethnically Jewish” because her maternal grandmother was a Jew. Of course, it is possible to express [insert flavor of bigotry here] even if you have friends, relatives, partners, or a spouse who identify as part of [group that is the target of that bigotry]. It’s a close cousin to the “some of my best friends a…
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…one recent example, Patriot Mobile—a NAR 7 Mountains Dominionism-inspired phone company in Texas—bankrolled the campaigns of 11 candidates for school board in the suburbs of Ft. Worth in May 2022. They all won, and they subsequently took control of four school boards. In one school district (but probably not the last) 40 books were soon pulled from the shelves for “review.” It remains to be seen whether book burnings will become more a part of th…
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…may not yield as reliable of estimates as probability samples taken over a phone or another method. That is, we tend to be somewhat skeptical of population estimates produced by such data.” Asked what they thought the purpose of the 2020 State of Theology Survey might be, and whether it might be geared toward driving evangelicals to the polls, Whitehead replied, “I do think there is a particular narrative that they are trying to push with this res…
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…Museum of American History as well as a prolific writer who has written a number of pieces for RD. Gordon Haber spoke to Manseau by phone. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tell us about the Jefferson Bible. What is it? Why did he do it? Jefferson wanted to distill the Gospels down to core teachings of Jesus as a moral teacher. So he went through copies of the Bible and cut out with a penknife everything that had to do with J…
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…from ministry, locked down at home, and “trying to be of service over the phone and zoom” to people in his church facing another pandemic. Pieters is part of a unique cohort for whom the current pandemic is both eerily familiar and puzzlingly different. LGBT Christian clergy who ministered in queer communities in the 1980s and 90s are engaging Covid-19 using some lessons learned from AIDS ministry in the years before treatment. They’re also grapp…
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…an alley in downtown Los Angeles, across the street from a bank and a cell phone store and a block away from a Little Tokyo walking mall. But up on a streetlight at the alley’s entrance, a city historical marker is tacked: Azusa St. Mission… Cradle of the Worldwide Pentecostal Movement. For some, this is sacred ground: the place where the Azusa Street Revival, the founding moment of the modern Pentecostal christian church, made its home in 1906, a…
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…logies, the change in policy isn’t quite as surprising. Social media, cell phones, video, and drone technologies make the sighting and the capture of images of UAPs ubiquitous and unregulated. If, as the report suggests, there’s an element of potential threat to national security concerning UAP sightings, it would be important for the military to regulate information regarding sightings. But are journalists like O’Brien correct that the public sph…
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…religiously-motivated pogroms afterwards. A few weeks ago, I spoke on the phone with a leader of New York City’s Bangladeshi Hindu community, who was extremely resistant to making the connection between the persecution of his fellow Hindus in Bangladesh and the persecution of Muslims in India. He insisted, “Please don’t tell me about India. I only want to focus on my people, Hindus in Bangladesh.” I suggested that there was folly in focusing on t…
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