Religion Dispatches
…e strings of his electric bass to bang out a rhythm that sounds like Morse code. When all twelve performers are on stage, the sounds that they make together are nothing less than astonishing. On top of it all rests the falsetto voice of the band’s vocalist, Jón Birgisson, who sings the lyrics with a keening wail: Bakvio sk´yjaból vaknar sól úr dvala Svalar sér vio kalda dropa regnsins leikur sér vio heita loga eldsins Byr til regnboga A rough tran…
Read More…it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, the idea, hang on, am I advising people to leave their church… yes!… If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish.” And the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good responded. Beck needs to get out more. I don’t know about the Book of Mormon, but here are just a few of the Bible verses concerning the poor and believer’s…
Read More…ligious freedom. In the terms of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, these corporations are called “churches,” their “integrated auxiliaries,” and “conventions or associations of churches,” where churches are defined as a “subset of IRC 501(c)(3) organizations organized and operated for religious purposes.” Necessarily, such entities are artificial or fictive persons under the law, subjects capable of claiming rights and bearing respon…
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…to conduct our life together at the National Youth Event in a manner that promotes a community of faith.” Literally, that manual spent three times more words trying to get the kids to drink water instead of Coca-Cola in the heat than it spent on its entire religious/theological content. It made me wonder if the football players or UCC kids had more rituals and prayers during their weeks. L: Your example catches the flavor, but there is more to sa…
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…iberal arts education and to have their behavior heavily regulated. Though codes of conduct may vary, evangelical universities like ORU, Liberty University, and Regent University all prohibit students from using illegal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, wearing provocative clothing, and engaging in premarital and homosexual sex. Bob Jones University actually prohibited interracial dating up until 2001. Oral Roberts believed that the survival of his own…
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…d appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was just an idea, and wouldn’t appear online in any form until 2005. John Paul did embrace social media as it existed then. He was the first pope to use SMS to send out a daily message to Catholics in 2004, after brokering a deal with Verizon—one of the first troubling commercial agreements between the Vatican and communications comp…
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…mythologies. Even without ever mentioning the words “Black” and “Haitian,” code words such as “immigrants,” “criminals,” and “illegal aliens” are indirect signifiers of Blacks, Haitians, Africans, and other targeted non-White groups. Such racecraft speaks to a peculiar devotion to America’s most treasured civil religion—Whiteness. It’s little more than a twenty-first-century performance of America’s long legacy of Black voter suppression that redu…
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…d back in 2014, defended itself by invoking section 18 of the Human Rights code, which allows a religious group to restrict participation to the faithful. So while AA presents itself to the public as a “spiritual” program, distinguishing itself from “religious” groups, it nevertheless claimed “religious” legal status in order to protect itself. Although the definition of “religion” is generally assumed in common parlance, it is not in any sense ea…
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…sly is. If we still had a Democratic Congress, we’d have a much fairer tax code (plus better health care, plus a thousand other things). But okay, that’s me. When I look at vast movements in history—fascism, socialism, American capitalism—they arise out of contexts that were, themselves, created by lots of large-scale circular movements which are impossible to trace precisely. Who knows, perhaps the collective weight of Occupy-style consciousness-…
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…calculated pi long enough, you’d eventually find the works of Shakespeare coded in 1’s and 0’s. “Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us — the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, a coding of our motions and all our thoughts through time, all our memories…. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal,” Pic…
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