Religion Dispatches
…g, highly observant LDS father. My friend described a brief, tension-laden phone call between father and son, wedged into a few free minutes after a church meeting. “Now, I’m going to serve my family,” said the father, bringing the call to a close. “Because that’s what I do.” And Mitt Romney is going to serve his country. Because that’s what he does. Like it or not. That joyless put-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel tenacity is setting the tone for the G…
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…force us to leave,” Robertson concluded. “I felt the full weight of their fear, and where there is such fear, we can be certain that there is no possibility of love. Phone calls and an email inquiry to representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention were not returned….
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…don’t involve Miller’s own research, and, despite the dubious sourcing, a number of Miller’s claims are persuasive. There is evidence—much of it from Miller’s own, peer-reviewed work—that self-reported spiritual experience lowers the risk for substance abuse, depression, and unprotected sex among adolescents. There’s also plenty of evidence that adolescents can use spiritual experiences and techniques to navigate emerging adulthood, a process Mil…
Read More…were terrified of him. The brothers never speak anymore; they talk on the phone at least once a day. It’s all there and it’s all unclear. All we know for a fact is that it all came apart very suddenly. On December 9, 2008, Bernie Madoff told his son, Mark, that he intended to pay out $173 million in holiday bonuses two months early. Deeply concerned, Mark revealed this to Andrew, who concluded that Madoff Securities should probably be re-named. T…
Read MoreI just got off the phone with Nancy Ratzen, president of the National Council of Jewish Women, who said the group would be issuing an endorsement of Elana Kagan later today. Ratzen, who said the NCJW has, since 2001, “engaged consistently on reviewing and taking positions and educating and mobilizing progressive Jewish community” on judicial nominations, said that the group would be working hard to see Kagan confirmed. “We think she has an except…
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…ign as head coach after discovering he’d been using his school-issued cell phone to call an escort service. Freeze was hired the following year by Liberty University, where he coached until he left for Auburn, just weeks after the announcement that his contract had been extended through 2030. Just this summer, Freeze contacted a former Liberty student, one of among 20 who’d taken legal action against Liberty for failing to pursue their sexual assa…
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…was offended and let the email sender know. It led to a rich and powerful phone conversation later that day where we both came to an agreement that, if followed logically, the examples tell a story of a God who is either capricious or lacking in any real power. If God can put small delays in the path of a few people headed for the Twin Towers that day, why not do that to all of them? If God has the power to save some, why not save all? Why not pe…
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…I shared what I learned with those standing around me or who didn’t have a phone, compared notes with others about what they knew, and tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as the passengers about what was happening—all around me, I sensed a complete failure of nerve. A black woman wearing a security vest crouched outside on the tarmac…
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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…r of the Baylor Religion Surveys. The Cubit recently reached out to him by phone to discuss purpose, religion in modernity, and the brilliance of Tony Robbins. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. In your book you argue that modernity has brought about a kind of existential confusion, and you discovered this in an interesting way: by comparing levels of happiness and purposefulness to per-capita GDP. Could you tell us more abou…
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