Religion Dispatches
…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …
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…the flag that wants them destroyed They saw their names listed in the telephone directory of destruction They were trained to turn the other cheek by newspapers that misspelled, mispronounced and misunderstood their names and celebrated when death came and stole their final laundry ticket” -excerpt from “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri Then the lights went out and the stage lit up, and 60,000 white people finally started paying attention….
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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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…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…
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…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…
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…alse—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from…
Read More…violence against LGBT people. For instance, Cristobal said a young man in Manila contacted her via Facebook last year because his brother had threatened to kill him because he was gay. She told him to call the police. “The brother was not there any more. Police came and gave their personal mobile number. The neighbors saw the police… were supportive of the gay guy, so I think that regulated them from directly telling him negative things,” she sai…
Read More…ed, and depressed. She decides to travel to Italy (eat), India (pray), and Bali (love), to explore the world, but more importantly, to explore her own inner-self. I will confess that at first glance such a enterprise seems excessive and narcissistic. In the midst of today’s economic crisis, where individuals are struggling for employment and healthcare, Gilbert’s angst seems abstract and indulgent. And yet … we watch films about men going to bache…
Read More…onor the situation, many specifically with regard to ritual. When I was in Bali, although I cover my hair and my body, with the occasional shorter sleeve shirt as the exception, I had to cover all of that with a cloth over my lower half to enter into the temples. That the woman in a bathing suit only had to use the same cloth was funny to me; but then, that was custom and I could only respect it, uniformity not withstanding. As for the chaos that…
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…r memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, accomplishes the “pray” portion of her title in Bali. Shetty is among the latest in a long line of “wise men from the East” who’ve found success in translating the “wisdom” from the East into the “language of the West” without the bothersome trappings of their particular cultural contexts. These “oriental monks” have traditionally accentuated their foreignness through their physical appearance—orange robes, “Eastern clot…
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