Religion Dispatches
…n the car; he asleep, and me trying to write a blog on my iPad. Let the record show, I was not successful, despite my best intentions. I managed to drop that daughter off just in time to head to Oakland as I had told my middle daughter I would. She needed assistance with the baby because her Canadian in-laws gave her a car, which had to be cleared at customs before local registration. Then we went to the farmers’ market, the flea markets, and the…
Read More…ck, and undo every good that you have done. And you still don’t get it. A word needs to be said here; that is to say, a word imagining the world differently, based on what we know and claim of God. That word, in brief, is that change—real, meaningful change, the kind God calls for—does not arise from easy reconciliation, nor again from charity, but from redemption, the purchasing back at great cost the lives and futures of the people of God. I do…
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…tes that we think of will as a kind of force that initiates action. But according to Wegner, will is “merely a feeling.” One moment I think, “I’m going to watch the Jets instead of writing this essay.” A moment later, I press the button on the TV remote. My thought seems to have caused my action, but correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Both free will and the concept of a unified self (which is a necessary precondition for free will)…
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The Rev. Cedric A. Miller, Senior pastor at Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune NJ, has instructed his married church leaders to get off of Facebook by this coming Sunday. Citing too many counseling sessions about marriage problems and infidelity, Rev Miller refers to many members “Christless past” as causing issues in their marriages as they peruse Facebook’s greener pastures. Miller’s admonition may be surprising to some (he clai…
Read More…ou need to know to keep on reading? I’d cheerfully watch that man read the phone book. So, when my buddy Rev. El Mundo sent me the link to the comedian’s message, I eagerly clicked on it. I was surprised when I saw this wasn’t a clip of his latest hysterical stand up, but an essay he penned for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. The topic of his essay was how he came to be an atheist. The whole piece is here. While there is humor in the pie…
Read More…the small wisdoms or the lessons I learned this Ramadan. In no particular order: Although Allah is always present, in the company of conscientious and devout believers, ones experience of that Divine presence is enhanced. This is what the Sufis mean with the idea of suhbah: companionship for the sake of Allah. But, and here’s the thing I got this year: people are different. It is really, really worth it to encourage yourself and others with whom…
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…“Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.” This very well could mean that the Bible Christians thought was more or less fixed in canonical form in the fourth century could once again be in play. It’s hard to know what it might mean for the practice of faith or the shape of the Church in the future wh…
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…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships. A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…
Read More…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…
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…Roman Catholic teaching, which one assumes Lila Rose intends to uphold. According to Catholic teaching, a lie (“speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church) is a sin. Always. Even if done for a good reason. And no, you can’t commit a sin to bring about a greater good. That point was made in oh, say, the 1968 papal encyclical reaffirming the Catholic Church’s ban on artificial birth contr…
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