Religion Dispatches
…he most recent newsletter posted by Occupy Theory [as of this posting, the site is down —Eds.], occupiers describe how sad they were about their lives, both present and future, until they found each other. If you were worried about “young people today” before, you will be terrified after you read about the emptiness, the bought-and-soldness, the futility, the lack of any place to be or person to be. Paul Mayer, a friend of the Berrigans, was in ou…
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…itute unveiled its academic freedom campaign, in 2008, complete with a web site providing sample legislation for interested state lawmakers. The institute’s John West made sure to stress that the bills never mentioned intelligent design. But as DI’s past actions clearly indicate, the goal was still to pry open the door for sympathetic teachers to teach intelligent design and creationism. Louisiana, Alabama, Michigan and Missouri all introduced sim…
Read More…opposition to the proposed Islamic center to be built near the Ground Zero site in New York City: An influential Jewish organization on Friday announced its opposition to a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, intensifying a fierce national debate about the limits of religious freedom and the meaning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The decision by the group, the Anti-Defamation League, touched o…
Read More…top headlines. Jill Stanek? Again, no mention in the top headlines and a site search turned up nothing. World Magazine, which is currently taking a critical stance toward the National Association of Evangelicals over the latter’s acceptance of a grant from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy? Again, my site search turned up nothing. It could be that nobody’s gotten around to writing about it yet, I guess. Or, it could…
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…ters, L’Enfant had no plans to extend the Mall westward beyond the current site of the Washington Memorial. (The Lincoln Memorial is built on landfill.) More importantly, throughout the nineteenth-century the Mall existed as a carefully managed urban forest, a patchwork of trees and plants that were the envy of visitors from throughout the world. What changed in the early twentieth century was a shift from thinking about the Mall as set of public…
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…ve network is part of an archaeological dig site declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999. Since the 1930s many early hominid fossils have been uncovered at Sterkfontein, including several complete or nearly complete skeletons. The interesting thing about these fossils, however, is that they are not the remains of our own hominid species, homo sapiens. Rather, the fossils uncovered at Sterkfontein are from other early hominid species—some…
Read More…, “When the Queer Cultural Festival opened on June 9, participants were outnumbered by protestors holding signs with slogans like ‘Stop Same-Sex Marriage’ and ‘Gays Out: Homosexuals have no human rights.’” Israel: Islamic leader stirs outrage with anti-gay op-ed; government rejects anti-discrimination law The deputy head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, “launched a scathing attack on homosexuality in an op-ed titled ‘You mak…
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…Alexander Jenner, is he still alive?” So I looked up his name. There was a site devoted to people who played on this label, Remington Records. It had bios of various people and didn’t mention any death date. I wrote to the person in Holland who put this site together and said, “Do you happen to know how to reach Alexander Jenner, is he still alive?” He gave me a postal address for Jenner in Vienna, so I wrote a four-page letter telling him how muc…
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…ut Palin and the NAR was reposted in its entirety on the Free Republic Web site, then a fight broke out between pro and anti-NAR site members. It was astounding! You produced over twenty stories and several videos on Palin. What are your plans for the future? The short answer is: books, longer and more ambitious articles, and even a full length video documentary or two. The New Apostolic movement relies heavily on visual media and pop music (much…
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…tells us…”) but it was generally accepted that the local Tewa people had visited this site for much the same purpose long before the first Spanish missionaries arrived. The church was built here, in other words, because the ground itself was already regarded as holy. Founded by Christians on land sacred to people who had lived there for millennia, El Santuario de Chimayo might be seen as a reply to the long-ago challenge put before Native American…
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