Religion Dispatches
…Paul did embrace social media as it existed then. He was the first pope to use SMS to send out a daily message to Catholics in 2004, after brokering a deal with Verizon—one of the first troubling commercial agreements between the Vatican and communications companies. For the most part, though, communications technologies at this time seemed a grand and wonderful thing, enabling the sharing of God’s truths with many in an easy and effective way. In…
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…ding from the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute’s sample academic freedom bill, explicitly says that teachers are permitted to use supplemental materials to teach critiques of evolution and opens the door to teaching creationism and intelligent design. In response, SICB chose to hold its annual conference in Utah, whose state Board of Education recently passed a resolution recognizing that “the Theory of Evolution is a major unifying conc…
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…or the right not to be fired for who you are. The right-wing legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is forthright about which particular religion’s freedom it looks to defend through its aggressive litigation and lobbying. “As secular forces chip away at our nation’s Judeo-Christian roots, religious freedom is increasingly threatened,” ADF writes on its website. A person’s faith, ADF says, is “more than where you worship on Sundays. It…
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…e Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.” This would, of course, mean making abortion a crime—and jailing women and their doctors for murder, a crime which in some states is still punishable by death. Davidson’s totalitarian dream would also entail finding a solution to what he calls…
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…tual world, but as someone who teaches about race, and slavery, you can be free even if others don’t think you are, or are worthy of being free. The bigger question that goes alongside of this is: can you become divine if you’re not real? Hmmn. That brings up all sorts of issues, especially if, as it seems presently, the writers are making this new religion suspiciously like Catholicism. I hope that the writers won’t go in the easy direction of co…
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…ose behavior is calculated to be disastrous.” Calculated disaster: 4chan’s users couldn’t have described their ambitions in better terms. The “Message to Scientology” proudly proclaims: “We are your SPs.” Nevertheless, Anonymous took the criticisms of the old guard to heart, particularly Mark Bunker’s suggestion that the group attempt to have the Church’s tax-exempt status in the United States revoked. (In the UK, where Chanology protests have dra…
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…The church must remain clear that pornography is not essentially wrong because it is addictive, but because of its titillating and deceptive message: it rips sexuality from its relational context and presents human beings not as creatures made in God’s image, but as sexual commodities, something to be bought and sold.” Johnson’s comment about Roe v. Wade curtailing the production of “able bodied workers” essential to a thriving economy suggests th…
Read More…ouch says this: We at Christianity Today believe Christians are absolutely free to use marijuana (where legalized). And, when it comes to pot in our particular cultural context, we think it would be foolish to use that freedom. For the CT editors, the moral quality of marijuana use seems to depend entirely upon the “cultural context” in which it occurs. And since our particular context is not conducive to marijuana use, marijuana use would be “foo…
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…ethamphetamine, xenon, ibogaine, bufotenine, and LSD. Although the show focuses on users and researches of the drugs in question, Morris often acts as a participant-observer, using the drugs himself to report their effects. Whatever the drug in question, however, the narrative always seems to circle back to questions relating to religion, in both explicit and inexplicit ways. Morris doesn’t so much present theses about the relationship between rel…
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…ace Force: God’s hand will guide these space soldiers in their “defense of freedom”—that is, the freedom of commercial enterprise. The administration advertised the biblical foundations of its protectionist pursuit of dominance in space with a ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral on January 12th, 2020. At an event that conflated Christian supremacism with American exceptionalism, the first Chief of Space Operations was sworn in on a King…
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