Religion Dispatches
Today’s most often e-mailed article on the WaPo site is Harold Meyerson’s column, “Hard-Liners for Jesus.” Meyerson, one of the best mainstream pundits out there, charges that there is a huge gap between the teachings of the gospels and the preachings of the “Gospel’s Own Party.” The GOPers tout the old-time religion while violating its biblical precepts, or—to be more exact—the particular biblical precepts that Meyerson approves. He has an easy…
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…g men and women for its Fall 2009 “Campus Life Tour.” According to its Web site, the “team consists of 8-10 young men and women (18-30 years of age), traveling throughout the United States with educational displays designed to introduce the abortion debate to high school and college campuses.” The Survivor team “challenge[s] students to rethink their position on abortion at hundreds of campuses every year,” and uses displays that include “graphic…
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…pwater disaster era, there was a problem with this plan: the burial-at-sea site was infested with oil. Kruse’s surviving brother, Frank, explained this complication to reporters at al.com, “We’d like to [scatter his ashes] sooner rather than later, but we really don’t know when we’ll be able to do it because you can’t predict what the oil’s going to do,” he said. “One day there’s no oil, and the next day we’re covered up with it.” I don’t know the…
Read More…f Rochester, whose president publicly chided Gandhi on the WaPo’s On Faith site. Now Gandhi is gone from Rochester for good. The big question that Gandhi’s original post raises is whether we should ever talk about the “identity” of a group of people, for example an ethnic group or a religious community. Is there such a thing? Maybe not. But many academics talk and write as if there is—maybe they should get fired simply for doing so, but that never…
Read More…our rights and ability to grow as a nation from our reverence to God.” At the tvTownhall website, the “about” link brings you to an extended biography (and beaming photograph) of Cain. There’s not a whole lot of action at the site apart from posting videos (but that hasn’t been updated since before the election). The site does show Tea Party and religious right comraderie: both the Family Research Council and Americans for Prosperity are sponsors….
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…y that can be fixed through ministry, counseling, and prayer. On their Web site, Exodus Youth provides “resources to help you minister to struggling youth, understand the root causes and treatment of homosexuality, address homosexuality as a church, and confront the false pro-gay theology.” The premise of Exodus is that youth must change, and that their sexuality is merely a disorder, addiction, or false identity. The most recent post on the Exodu…
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…en to be sexually promiscuous before marriage” (emphasis in original). The site encourages people to go to the American Life League’s anti-Planned Parenthood STOPP site for more information. ALL and its project STOPP (which 40 Days for Life founder David Bereit once headed) were once considered the fringe of the anti-choice movement. All that has changed as the Republican Party has taken up calls to shut down Planned Parenthood and restrict acces…
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…the thousands ignored each year. 4. Curate as Curator As social networking sites grow as prime destinations for day-to-day distraction (with more than half of all adults in the U.S. visiting social networking sites “for no particular reason,” according to a recent survey), engaging content will have increasing significance. It’s important to remember that “engaging” doesn’t mean ‘shiny’ or ‘loud.’ Rather, it means content that appeals to or produc…
Read More…evious policy. We might examine the International Olympics as an important site for illuminating this paradox; they also help to show how religion plays a subtle and complicating role in these issues. Racism has long been deemed out of bounds in the international arena. Regimes like the South African regime under apartheid could be suspended from participation, a decision grounded in some conviction about the universality of the strictures against…
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…he most recent newsletter posted by Occupy Theory [as of this posting, the site is down —Eds.], occupiers describe how sad they were about their lives, both present and future, until they found each other. If you were worried about “young people today” before, you will be terrified after you read about the emptiness, the bought-and-soldness, the futility, the lack of any place to be or person to be. Paul Mayer, a friend of the Berrigans, was in ou…
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