Religion Dispatches
…book that first suggests that their voices, like Anne’s, can be used to struggle to make sense of the world. Much has be written about the folly of trying to make a story like Anne Frank’s into everyone’s story. Francine Prose, for one, in her book about the diary and its author, lamented attempts through endless translations and adaptations to replace “the particular” with the “so-called universal.” Yet in at least one video of Jeff Mangum’s set…
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…hey’ve stopped working well. You have a knee injury, break your leg, your crutch is going to help you really well for a while, but if you keep leaning on that crutch, eventually your leg will become weaker and weaker. You satirize the way that Ultra Spiritual people can replace the anti-dogmatic pluralism of New Age with a kind of consumerist individualism. There’s a “truthiness” there, since they selectively appeal to religious and scientific fac…
Read More…visit for the Charleston Gazette, Mackenzie Mays observes: In her YouTube videos, Stenzel says birth control makes a woman “10 times more likely to contract a disease . . . or end up sterile or dead.” Many of the videos warn of sexually transmitted diseases and also say, “Sex could damage you for the rest of your life.” Sex also could lead to “scarred fallopian tubes and cancer . . . and you need to ask Jesus for forgiveness.” In addition, Stenze…
Read More…stroyer, whose acceptance is conditioned on your strict adherence to “His” rules, has ruined too many lives. What needs to change is not the LGBT child, but this horrible and terribly wrong image of God as a holy bully that is being purveyed by religious institutions and believers. The trouble is, though, this image of God has worked very well for those in power. Despite growing support for LGBT people in the polls, this issue still has enough of…
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…itchen.” Langar is based on the idea, begun by Nanak Dev, the first Sikh guru, that feeding and clothing people is the most fundamental human transaction of all. To feed people is seva—voluntary, selfless service. A Sikh community in Medford, Massachusetts, Gurdwara Guru Nanak Darbar, is typical of many Sikh places of worship in this tradition of hospitality. On Sunday, August 12 the Gurdwara is holding a vigil for those injured or killed in the O…
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…held hostage to the Obama administration’s efforts to promote LGBT rights internationally. Also speaking was Aaron Manaigo, a political strategist Jackson has hired to run the campaign. Manaigo described himself as having gotten into politics as one of the “young gunslingers” for the late dirty trickster Lee Atwater, and he was reportedly an advisor to Herman Cain during the primaries. Manaigo said marriage is under a “barrage of attacks” and cit…
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…the DNC raise are not new. In 2007, Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi scrutinized “Romney’s Honesty Problem” on abortion, and John McCain’s presidential campaign developed an anti-Romney ad strikingly similar to the DNC’s. But this time around, as attention continues to consolidate on Romney as once-and-future frontrunner, it seems clear that the honesty meme is going to stick. It may in fact be the issue that defines the Romney candidacy. For…
Read More…y focusing on the bully, Wiseman said, it becomes a matter of the victim’s word against the word of the bully, and if FotF gets its way and strips specific categories from anti-bullying laws, the victim won’t even be able to use the words necessary to describe what they were being bullied about. “If you take out the language of naming the behavior, then it becomes so amorphous that there’s no place for that kid to define what is happening to them….
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…y success of the Left Behind series. You may recall that these novels (and videos and YA series and films) are a dramatization of the evangelical version of the apocalypse—that is, the Rapture, when all the true believers are snatched up to heaven and the rest of us are left here to battle it out. Left Behind is smug, violent, sexist, racist and anti-Semitic. Reading it, one sometimes imagines a drooling white supremacist scribbling in crayon. Nev…
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…world destroyer and, like Buddhism, expresses a cosmic view of periods of world destruction and world renewal. Closer to home, the pan-Indian Ghost Dance movement included a prophesy that the current world would end and the whites would disappear. And let’s not forget about that Mayan calendar which many believe foretells the world’s destruction in 2012. 3. Americans are fixated on world destruction. Forget about what the religions of the world s…
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