Religion Dispatches
…-age life style has led her to a level of arrogance I can sometimes barely manage to abide by. I think it is good and necessary for all human beings to continually make choices that they think will improve the quality of their lives: food, clothing, spirituality, geography— whatever it takes. But I am clear that there are no choices that anyone makes which earns them the place better than others who make different choices. So, it is better for not…
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…is that so long as both parties are well-matched, and so long as they both manage to get in a few good arguments, a few moments of mesmerizing rhetoric, or a few clever put-downs that get the fans cheering, both sides can declare victory. There is no official scoreboard, and each can return to his respective constituencies at the end of the day and spin the contest as a win. Wilson can go back to his evangelical fan base and say, as he did in the…
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…give Paul’s admittedly off-center ideas about the cost and consequences of American Empire any hearing at all. Which means that they dismiss not just Paul himself but also all of the young enthusiasts he has been able to draw to his side, many of them so drawn on account of his plain talk about US military adventurism, and almost surely not on account of any Paul-ist association with anti-Semitism or homophobia or white racism. Because this matter…
Read More…ntic relations, and pursuing higher education. She describes the emotional management of being an outsider to her family, while also trying to become an insider in a new world. In this particular life-story, the author’s family relations triumphed over religious ideology, though that’s certainly not always the case. Enduring full losses of significant social systems compounds the challenge of integrating into and navigating a new world—a world one…
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…or not, is read through a racial lens, even when he proclaims how many white people like him. By willfully performing ‘race” Cain’s so called “confidence” erodes his viability as a real candidate. Cain’s show may take him to the nomination if he can manage to bring his ragtag campaign together. But for this brainwashed African American professor, Cain’s exit from my television set with his 2012, 21st century minstrel show can not come soon enough….
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…, “It is better not to marry!” But Jesus responded that not everyone could manage this: “there are eunuchs who were born that way… and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs… and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.” (Jesus himself kindly spared some poor wife the pain of widowhood, poverty, and heartbreak.) The apostle Paul echoed this idea in…
Read More…“people really began to take notice” of his blog, and it soon became RNS’ “number one traffic generator,” and remained so for the duration of Merritt’s time writing at the site. Problems began to arise in 2017, still during Socolovsky’s tenure as editor, when Merritt began to notice missing payments. Earlier this year, Merritt asked to talk to Gallagher, who told him that he was out of contract and would need to be issued a new one. But Merritt be…
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…real world empires in our day. The best we can do is back lesser evils who manage the empire well. Some may say this is a pragmatic partnership. If so, it’s one with little accountability and almost no ability to push back. Obama’s nearly three million deportations (including plans to target Central American women and children once again in 2016) and Clinton’s hawkishness can be forgiven whereas it’s the Republicans who commit unpardonable sins. A…
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…sense of what that means historically is to understand resistance to core American values that founded this country. To be black and Christian and an intellectual is a formula that the United States may need, but not certainly one that it desires. There is no impetus for this dynamic of black Christian intellectuals relegated to spaces only nominally public to change until the American public finds a way to desire the voice and opinion black Chri…
Read More…to everyday members. While the institutional LDS Church once preferred to manage controversial elements of its own history—for example, the polygamy of Joseph Smith, or questions about the origins of the Book of Mormon—by presenting carefully crafted lessons in its own manuals, leaving more complicated discussions to scholarly journals and progressive magazines known to only a minority of Church members, the internet has now put an array of infor…
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