Religion Dispatches
…fers at the hands of radical Islam, he said, ‘The eyes of the world are on California. We’re watching California and the vote on marriage. Because if you fail there to stop it, if you fail to stop it, what will be unleashed across the world will be a spirit worse than radical Islam.’” In late September, Sergey Brin, cofounder and the president of Technology at Google, took a public stand in opposition to Proposition 8. The statement, titled “Our p…
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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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…d when my neighborhood was attacked on September 11, 2001. I saw the first plane hit as I came down the steps to put my kids on the schoolbus. I thought it was an air traffic accident, just kept walking down to the swimming pool on Chambers Street. Ran into neighbors spilling out on the street, muttering about terrorists. Then the next plane hit and I decided not to go to the pool. One of my neighbors sat on the steps sobbing as her toddlers jumpe…
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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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…udio was opened by a longtime editor at Glamour, Suze Yalof Schwartz. In a phone interview, Yalof Schwartz said that she decided to open the studio when she couldn’t easily find a place to learn meditation. I asked Yalof Schwartz how Unplug differed from the dozens of Buddhist centers that immigrants and hippies have sprinkled across the hills of Southern California. “Meditation is a science,” she replied. “It’s literally build[ing] your brain. Yo…
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…
Read More…those heterosexually married folks could be headed for the 2012 ballot in California. Mercury News reports that “the 2012 California Marriage Protection Act has cleared a major legal milestone: Last week, the secretary of state’s office gave [John] Marcotte permission to start gathering signatures. To make the June 2012 ballot, he’ll need nearly 700,000 approved signatures by the spring of that year.” The 38-year-old Marcotte has said such a meas…
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…an religious landscape. In his book The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape, journalist Erik Davis places Burning Man alongside other Golden State phenomena. Burning Man arose from the ashes of Haight-Ashbury and what Davis calls California’s “great polytheistic fusion of transplanted religions, nature mysticism, tools of transport, and creepy cults.” But nineteenth-century camp meetings and spiritualist conventions…
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…from an eight-week experience between “the heavenly plane and the earthly plane” after Jordan’s death, during which she says “God spoke very candidly with me.” After that period, she said, “I had such a tremendous sense of purpose for the first time in my life.” While Schenck shares that sense of purpose, the film shows his tense encounters trying to change fellow white evangelicals’ minds. Schenck discovers that even members of his own staff hav…
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