Religion Dispatches
…ve both: either it’s the trust or it’s the worry.” So I let go, for just a minute. Yesterday was magnanimous! It had been two weeks since the tour company received my passport by express mail when they told me I had to choose, apply for the visa or go to Berlin. They said then, the embassy says it will take 10-12 business days. I figured: if they got my visa into the embassy on the same day it arrived, at least ten days were up. Anyway I was too n…
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…ng of Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy in 1981. Hunt also tried to buy all the world’s silver as a hedge against the financial collapse he believed the Bible predicted. He lost $1.7 billion and went bankrupt in 1989. He died at 88. Johnny Lee Clary A Ku Klux Klan leader who rejected racism and became a pentecostal evangelist, Johnny Lee Clary died at 55. Clary joined the Klan at age 14. He rose quickly, heading an Oklahoma organization at…
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…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…
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…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…
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…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…
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…ans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place….
Read More…es ECI’s leadership – knows this to be the case. Which makes ECI’s video a cheap lie — yet another in a long litany of desperate efforts by the far right to convert the largely liberal American Jewish community to neo-conservatism, hawkish policies on Israel, and the belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” is a Muslim. That said, there actually are two interesting forms of antisemitism going on here. First is the antisemitism of ECI itself. To tug at…
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…makes any practical difference. Trump ended up speaking for more than 100 minutes. It was a wild ride, even for him. Rather than a coherent speech, it seemed at times like an AI had been fed right-wing talking points and gone on a rampage. “I am your warrior, I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution, I am your retribution,” Trump announced to enthusiastic cheers. He amped up his 2016 vision of “Am…
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…rm abortions even on non-viable, life threatening ectopic pregnancies (the number one cause of maternal mortality). Similarly, Louisiana is already moving to pass a fetal personhood bill, which would treat all abortions as homicide punishable by life in prison, including those necessary to prevent the death of the mother. The US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world already, and these bills will only drive it higher. The eth…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
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