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Report from Paris During COP21: Let Us Not Commit Global Suicide

…ine had come to a full stop, even though that was the line for people with reservations. (Reservations? Who knew?) We had gone for the show, not the protest. Being the kind of people who can neither climb poles or stand in long lines, or wait to get busted by the French riot police (they don’t seem to have read Thoreau on civil disobedience) we went across the street to the Petit Palais, where we enjoyed a wonderfully quirky permanent collection (…

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Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

…ability of cell phones to be used for impure activities, some Jewish cell-phone users have requested so-called “kosher” phones. The idea is to offer conservative Jews a phone that is free of “corrupting influences” of the sort that are already avoided by ultra-orthodox Jews through a ban on television and some radio. Reuters reported in February 2008 that Bezeq Israel Telecom launched a new “kosher” landline phone service, which will block calls…

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Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…

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A Pope, a Poet, and a Drug War

…ncil for Justice and Peace. No plans have been made for a private audience with the pope. It remains to be seen what Benedict will say when he arrives in Mexico. His predecessor, John Paul II, was much loved by many Mexican Catholics and went to great lengths to encourage devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. One famous painting, still visible in Mexico, shows John Paul II embracing the Virgin, with his head laying softly on her breast. Benedict XV…

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The British (Bible) Invasion: KJV 400-Year Anniversary Rolls On

…at it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” Transatlantic Express An almost continual dance back and forth across the Atlantic is central to the story Bragg wishes to tell. The KJV was born in England in 1611, but almost immediately crossed over to the New World. John Wesley’s Methodism, Charles Wesley’s music, and George Whitefield’s hypnotic sermonizing enjoyed some successes in England but took firm root in New World s…

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Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

…can raise up holiness out of any human distortion is what that says. So, a virgin birth is no big deal. When you view it that way it stops being a tenet of belief that you must believe in order to be Christian. “Galileo rendered God homeless and Isaac Newton rendered God unemployed so wherever we thought God was and whatever we thought God did, we can no longer think that way.” Which would rule out both Paul and Mark, who had never heard of the vi…

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We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

…ualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marriages in many countries. I am glad to see that in Section 34 he understands this basic fact of contemporary western culture: The ideal of marriage, marked by a commitment to exclusivity and stability, is swept aside whenever it proves inconvenient or tiresome. The fear of loneliness and the desire for stability and fidelity exist side by side with a growing fe…

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God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

…dated ourselves to these new circumstances, but not happily and with grave reservations about where this is taking us. And now it seems a mainly youthful Occupy movement is giving voice to all of our previously silent reservations and shouting out a very loud non serviam! It really leaves the establishment with very little to say. What’s their response going to be: domination is good for you??  It was a little more than three decades ago when Marg…

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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…tes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgency,” writes Virgin executive Ron Faris, covering SoulCycle for the Harvard Business Review. “It’s irrational commerce at its finest.” In some ways, SoulCycle looks like a prosperity gospel church for secular coastal elites. Preachers in the prosperity gosp…

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Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

…tian radical A. J. Muste calling Moses the organizer of “Brickmakers Union Number 1” and a pacifist Russian rabbi named Tamaret—wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. In that Telling, the then ongoing, even now unfinished, struggle of Black America for freedom was interwoven with the ancient story of the Israelites’ struggle to end their slavery under Pharaoh. Where the old Haggadah had what seemed to me a silly argument about ho…

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