Religion Dispatches
…hip. It’s not ironic that many Egyptians don’t care. It’s disgusting. The military went after Copts at Maspero, and few said anything. (While, we should add, the Brotherhood was at least ostensibly in charge.) Now they’ve gone after the most organized political opposition in the country, killing hundreds and wounding thousands—blood spilled is not soon forgotten. The Egyptian military’s crackdown on the Brotherhood in decades past left us with Sa…
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…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
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…church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second which teachers you admire, and then you get into a long conversation about the relative virtues of all of them. A really good example of how all these te…
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…n-ambivalent relationship ordinary Americans have with the gargantuan U.S. military and its role as both economic engine and coercive apparatus. UFOs have been a matter of military study since the late 1940s, when pilots began reporting flying objects that moved strangely. At first the concern was over experimental aircraft by enemies—particularly the Soviet Union—during the Cold War. But this reasoning did not bear out with events. The military’s…
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…a random sample size and therefore isn’t statistically representative. The number of individuals reporting victimization in Episcopal spaces is alarming nonetheless. However, I would argue the data is more likely to under- than to overestimate the scope of the abuse that occurs. To see why, the survey results must be interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+…
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….” In the last Gaza war, said Sax, there was discussion of Israel’s “noble military.” But in Operation Protective Edge, the military’s use of “warning” bombs and leaflets to alert Gazans to evacuate is starting to be increasingly seen “as either a form of hasbara”—Israeli public diplomacy, or “explaining”—“or psychological warfare and none of those things are worth defending.” This critique is not limited to academia; Jon Stewart has popularized i…
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…haplains are disallowed the privilege of blessing those relationships in a military setting. Military policy is like that. It is ordered not to the sectarian needs of chaplains—or the Archbishop’s desire for maximal religious liberty—but to the secular needs of the military, which provides chaplains to boost the morale and discipline of the troops. Many studies and the examples of foreign militaries have proven beyond doubt that allowing LGBT per…
Read More…“If all men of courage and men that had a moral compass were to leave the military, then we wouldn’t have a military. There would be nobody left to serve and protect. So I don’t really—I would serve regardless of what comes out of Washington.” But, not letting facts get in the way of a good scare, Perkins – faced with a Democratic commitment to move repeal of the ban in the lame duck session – continued with his “hair on fire” hysterics: The surv…
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…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…
Read More…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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