Religion Dispatches
…that happened over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a…
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…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…
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…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…
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…that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quickly ran into a problem that’s been under discussion for at least two th…
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…nt, it does so at the expense of the monks’ own goals. Moreover, since the number of official monks in a monastery is fixed, new monks can be admitted into the official ranks of the monastery only after a slot is vacant. Rather than admitting scholar-monks, however, government bureaucrats, who have the final say on whether or not a given monk will be admitted, are increasingly opting for admitting middle-aged worker-monks who, being past the ideal…
Read More…ot. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my student. “Those are my daughters…
Read More…onnected to the interfaith community, I feel it’s all so tribal. There’s a lot of culture wrapped up in these denominations; even the most progressive expressions of Christianity strike me as marketing and branding. Nor am I attracted to atheist churches like Sunday Assembly because I just don’t care for the format of an evangelical worship service. One of the perks of being an atheist is not having to do that anymore. I’ve been in the religion bu…
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…eir microwave, not to bring their toaster oven and not to bring their cell phone. It was almost funny. Following that announcement from the now infamous loud “speaker,” he said that fajr prayer would be at 5:40. I should have thought more clearly about this, but as it stands, I have three different prayer time schedules: my iphone has one from the Ipray app; and I printed one off line from Islamicity; then collected one from my favorite mosque, wh…
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…teresting. Without those miraculous or supernatural elements there’s not a lot going on. You don’t get the sense of the Jesus that millions of people for centuries have talked about, gotten excited by. But Jefferson wasn’t interested in that Jesus. He wanted to peel all that away and present Jesus from a rational perspective. In your own book, you refer to the Jefferson Bible as “all setup and no payoff.” Well, the figure of Jesus is bizarre. You…
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…loyed scripts and talking points; others were more informal. “There were a lot of cups of coffee shared,” says Peterson. She noted that whereas floor debates over this issue have sometimes been rancorous—what she calls the “Nazis and child molesters” arguments over gay people—the one-on-one conversations in her presbytery were much more gracious. Perhaps there is something about the intimacy of a personal encounter that makes over-the-top rhetoric…
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