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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…altogether. The number of former, non-practicing Catholics in the US now rivals the number of actual Catholics, comprising a shadow church of lost adherents that will trail Francis as he moves through former Catholic strongholds like New York and Philadelphia that have closed churches by the dozen. And the numbers make it clear that the Catholic rate of disaffiliation isn’t an artifact of the general trend toward non-affiliation; in fact, it’s the…
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…Neopagan festivals, to name a few. Burning Man offers a bit of everything available at other large festivals: New Age lifestyle tools and goddess worship; music of all kinds day and night; community kitchens and mind-enhancing drugs; a game of golf, a roller rink and other games and sports; and religious pilgrimage. Time and space are said to be different in Black Rock City. No one was talking on cell phones, clocks were largely invisible, and the…
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…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…
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…I shared what I learned with those standing around me or who didn’t have a phone, compared notes with others about what they knew, and tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as the passengers about what was happening—all around me, I sensed a complete failure of nerve. A black woman wearing a security vest crouched outside on the tarmac…
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…ngs holds the rights to Gershwin’s composition and presumably to such “derivative works.” Yet I also know that as a graduate of Harvard Law, you must appreciate the difference between legal permission and moral propriety. I would welcome the opportunity to sit with you so as to attempt to move your conscience to my conviction that we must humble ourselves before this sublime work. But for now I will not rest, I will not sit back, relax, and enjoy…
Read More…the system. I never know what that mark is and the extent of my detainment varies but I am always searched. Whenever I would enter in Indonesia, having done so at least 15 times in the year and half I lived there, I could see the computers as the passport is swiped and it reads “No known alerts.” I still hover over the counter as they swipe, wondering if the “alert” from the US side or the “fatwas” from various parties, will one day appear there a…
Read More…glad to be supporting Rick,” Jill Duggar, 20, told me. “He is a humble servant, he is the true conservatives in the race.” She insisted that support for Santorum is not wavering even in the face of polls showing him significantly behind both Romney and Gingrich. For this one-of-19 daughter of a reality show that depicts a fundamentalist Christian view of the role of women, motherhood, and reproduction, supporters look at Santorum and say, “hey, h…
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…many, it may have actually helped the cause of gay rights. Steve Hill The evangelist behind the Brownsville Revival in Pensacola, Fla., Steve Hill died at 60. Hill’s testimony was that he had been saved from drug addiction at 21 and a merciful judge sent him to David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge instead of prison. He became a missionary with the Assemblies of God in the 1980s and then a traveling evangelist in the 1990s. Hill preached at the Brownsv…
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…e of continued resistance to the advance of marriage equality, where conservative Catholic and evangelical Christians have been rallying opposition with the help of US-based religious groups and who want to but a restrictive definition of marriage into the country’s constitution. The Civil Registry of the state of Chihuahua reportedly suspended what had been the practice of granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples without forcing them to get…
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