Religion Dispatches
…r greed, deception, and capitalist success…and he’s running for president. For historians, the picture you are painting is determined by where you put the frame. Since I put the frame at 1800, I’m okay. But if I put it at 2016, I might be hanging myself. * * * Also on The Cubit: Donald Trump has turned Islam into the new communism…
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…ned with authentic caring.” Examples include Whole Foods Market, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and, somewhat mysteriously, Amazon.com, which is known for using underpaid temp-style labor in its warehouses and allegedly mistreating employees at its home offices. You don’t have to be a Marxist to question whether these institutions are “fulfilling every major value of the great spiritual traditions.” At the very least, that sentiment might seem ali…
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…n review the status of LGBT people in Cambodia, which “has seen increasing numbers of gays emerging into public life as the country continues to rapidly normalize after three decades of war.” Cambodians have traditionally shunned the gay community, and LGBT practices are often viewed as being against nature and a threat to rebuilding the social order in the aftermath of three decades of war, which obliterated the country’s social fabric. Overcomin…
Read More…er he defrauded parishioners in a Ponzi scheme. Archaeologists unearthed an 1800-year-old statue of the Buddha in India. In Iowa, a pastor is praying that the IRS comes after his church for his political campaign against three Iowa Supreme Court judges who ruled to allow same-sex marriages. The American Family Association has joined in the campaign against the judges. Finally, the words of one of the Chilean miners rescued after 69 days trapped in…
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…decades, reading pretty much every periodical in French and English back to 1800 as he looked for reports of “super-constructions in the sky” (what we would now call UFOs) and paranormal people. He found plenty of both. In works like The Book of the Damned (1919) and Wild Talents (1932), Fort created an entire super-vocabulary. Here we encounter things like a super-bat, super-biology, super-chemistry, a super-dragon, super-evil, super-geography, s…
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…or Human Rights (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights-North America), which has 1800 affiliated rabbis. “Rabbis tend to be more progressive than their congregations and more knowledgeable” about Israel, Jacobs added, but fear losing their jobs, members, and donations, as well as contending with pushback from their more hawkish congregants—who may well be a very vocal minority. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the past president of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrot…
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…and only the sorority, Alpha Phi International Women’s Fraternity and its Delta Tau chapter at Louisiana State University, got it right. Emily Hines, the undergraduate in question, was expelled from her sorority for mocking U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, an openly transgender public figure, in a transphobic TikTok video in which Hines sported a baby blue Alpha Phi sweatshirt. For its part, the leadership of Hines’s sorority re…
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…hat. I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that “some” adds up to a significant number. Not, at least, on the grounds of Novavax’s supposed selling point. To be fair, that’s not all there is to the piece. In fact, the question about Novavax’s allure reads like a wrapper for a bigger narrative about anti-vaxx activism merging with right-wing Christian nationalism. There’s an interesting story to be told there, and you should follow all the links in Jenk…
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…cs were polled separately from the undifferentiated mass of “nones,” their numbers would be better. In any case, the report’s assumptions notwithstanding, the data clearly show that America’s white Christians continue to exhibit a large and dangerous anti-social and anti-democratic streak. The report’s treatment of the white evangelical demographic in particular seems to be overly rosy, given that the drop in white evangelical vaccine refusal from…
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…t were near each other, thanks to the physical characteristics of the Nile delta. Both the earth’s physical features, and human beings’ built environments, marked a boundary between the two. That boundary is harder to find in most American cities, where the divide between “Anytown” and “the greater Anytown area” might not be a line at all, but a more gradual widening of lot sizes, along with some demographic shifts. A lot of people who aren’t resi…
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