Religion Dispatches
…ented from holding public office. In the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of Catholic hospitals was growing, the Know Nothing party organized around shared fears that Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany were overwhelming the country and acting against white Protestant interests. So the fear of a Catholic ghetto must be understood in light of a real history of Catholics being marginalized during the very time that their health car…
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…l correctness, which may be more effective at driving hateful speech underground than eliminating it altogether. These krewes openly confront racist and anti-Semitic notions that may be whispered in dark recesses where, if left unchallenged, they can fester and spread. But there is another dimension to the appeal of Krewe du Jieux. Before moving here I had not had a very strong attachment to my Jewish identity. In fact, after posting some Krewe du…
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…ng today’s self-styled progressive religious leaders that finding “common ground” with uncompromising opponents is the best path to change. In addition to Moody’s work detailed above—most notable perhaps for the way in which he showed great leadership by following and learning from women, and not by lecturing and telling them what to do—the Reverend ran support groups (and memorials) for gay men during the early days of the AIDS crisis (when few w…
Read More…stranger, call your partner and make a confession. 8. Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it every time you think about harassing a woman! Rubber bands are cheap – mere cents. Why, you could snap yourself with a rubber band more-or-less constantly for the next year, for a fraction of what any of those fancypants remedies cost. 9. Tell yourself what, deep down, you most need to hear: “I deserve better than to be a meanspirited bullying h…
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…strange political climate we’re in, the Bible seems to be getting tossed around an awful lot. Erstwhile candidate Michele Bachmann was even asked in one debate whether she believed the Bible required her to be “submissive” to her husband. Politicians are trying to enforce that aura around the Bible and competing to be seen as taking it the most literally. What do you make of that? I think it’s sick, though I think there is less of it now than dur…
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…der dresses and ridiculously high-heeled shoes. They sipped from splits of cheap sparkling wine while their tuxedoed companions swilled the local brew, Budweiser—that, too, a faded American icon, sold off in 2008 to the Belgium-based multinational, InBev. No, of course, these were not the protesters who have begun to appear in more and more American cities, but keepers of the once-stable base of a certain version of the fabled American Dream: wedd…
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…ow the kind of intellectual openness found routinely in parochial schools around the world. Imagine it! Who are you? Do you disbelieve in God? Why? Do you disbelieve in God because your mother disbelieves in God? Do you believe there’s no God because smart people told you so? Precisely what God do you not believe in? Might there be another you could believe in?, etc. What many Catholics know, and what Richard Dawkins appears not to, is that the i…
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…s, when humans establish new places, they establish an omphalos, a center around which to organize themselves (and keep others de-centered). In doing so, they mirror sacred reality and thus transform chaos into cosmos. Curiously, modern American city centers eschew the car, preserving it for pedestrians and public transport. Indeed, the epicenters seem designed to embrace not the individual but the public, not the private capsule of the car, but s…
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…Sudanese flag: a blue triangle with a yellow star; black, green, and red stripes. An old Dinka man once told me the blue represents the Nile, the green the land, the red the blood of Christ. Under a headless palm tree on the parched land of the kibbutz courtyard, William told me how he used to hide in the mango trees near Abyei, their leaves so thick you couldn’t see the sun. Now, the borderland is barren, apart from the few trees that don’t need…
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…which we actually become attached to the fear and create a whole culture around it, as with the Godzilla cult that grew up in Japan in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see something like that today in the activities of radical environmentalists who don’t actually organize for change but prefer to wallow instead in the pornography of planetary decline and death. A Proposal: Try Working Under the Rainbow Sign For everyone purveying apocalypt…
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