Religion Dispatches
…Bram Stoker’s Dracula may recall that The Count is a master at real estate deals, acquiring multiple lairs throughout London.) When Fox and CNN scrambled to cover the story, Rodgers was asked to come to a satellite office in Philadelphia. He commented, “The network anchors didn’t see me until we were about to go live. I don’t know if they even noticed my fangs, to be honest.” The resulting interviews were rather surreal, resembling a scene from HB…
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…al and collective faith and salvation. He claims that liberation theology “deals exclusively with external realities” and does not address the issues of personal grace. What role does grace play in liberation theology? In that show it is ludicrous that on the one hand he is saying that there is no such thing as social justice in the gospel—that we are supposed to take care of people because we simply want to—and that everything happens by virtue o…
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…th century concept of quality common schooling—which really was “America’s best idea” (which is not to say that the creation of a national park system was a bad idea). The well-heeled wannabe saviors have all rallied behind the Obama-Duncan cash competition to induce states to trash established practices and put forward the most edgy and experimental ideas in order to boost student achievement on standardized tests: as if we do not already have en…
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…o reported in these pages that the program included a discussion about how best to deal with religious belief and its relationship to science. The session was named “Science and Religion: Confrontation or Accommodation?” Or, to be abundantly clear, the question was: How should atheists and secular people deal with religious people? Should they be accommodated or confronted? My answer is: Neither one. Perhaps those atheists who want to advance thei…
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…: “The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability.” The Bush administration largely ignored the ISG’s recommendations and decided instead to undertake the Iraq “surge.” It’s hugely ironic, then, that one of the ISG’s most controversial conclusions has now been brought safely within bounds by the hero of that surge, Gen. Petraeus. None of these developme…
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…settlers freely appropriated from the people they just dispossessed. They bestowed pseudo-Indian place names and told fake Indian legends about those named landforms. Mount Timpanogos is one such storied place. Utah is a great case study for this historical dynamic because Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced American Indians as spiritual kin, the “Lamanites” from the Book of Mormon. Only in Utah did a US col…
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…acts, knew our interests, and just made sure that things worked out in our best interests. Of course, I don’t know what to do with the mixed tech we see in Caprica, where the rich families have a robo-butler and the police are still using VHS tapes. Do our own contemporary police and security forces really store records on videotape or do they create digital records? Diane asks about the representations of the news media in this week’s episode. Th…
Read More…ile, and sometimes by, outsourcing and destroying jobs, at times financing deals through “leveraged buyouts” that added substantially to the debts of companies trying to stay afloat. One source close to the GOP candidate told the Globe that Romney’s was “a life balanced between fear and greed.” The stories led Washington Post columnist James Downie to ask Monday what Romney’s business-world strategy would mean for the American economy. Who are the…
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…s are forming their own militias and creating new leaders adept at cutting deals and getting access to money that was supposed to pay for reconstruction. The predatory corruption of government officials and connected tribal leaders is pervasive, direct, and unrelenting, which helps to explain why $200 billion of reconstruction aid has produced almost no reconstruction. Iraq could explode again at any time, because Sunni leaders are demanding real…
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…upheld the ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion.” “The praying church deals with the demonic realm, so that God raises up one and brings down the other,” Engle said in a recent video on The Call’s Web site, explaining how prayer proved victorious over satanic forces in the spiritual warfare of an election, adding, “I directly attribute [Bush’s election] to the prayers of the saints.” Young people at his House of Prayer, said Engle, had been p…
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