Religion Dispatches
…t my favorite has always been “Moroccan Christmas.” My horn can pierce the sky. Bars are always better at Christmas time. Hanging up tinsel and sparkly lights can make any dive feel like home. So, Cheers has to make the list for great Christmas episodes. Limiting myself to only one Saturday Night Live sketch, the best would have to be Alec Baldwin’s Schewddy Balls. As much as Christmas is about humor, it’s also about the warm and fuzzi…
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…s one of her three sons in an act of unspeakable grace. She, not the macho sky-god of the oxymoronic “Religious Right,” represents religion as Ought; as the impulse toward poetry rather than the prosaic. Of course, in the chauvinism of traditional religion, it is the feminine that is denigrated as too earthly, too fleshly. Yet here the feminine, precisely by refusing to denigrate the earth, also embodies its transcendence. As the film makes clear…
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…regional mandate to act, and there was no army for us to destroy from the sky. So does that mean I’m okay with this? Actually, no. And that’s a solid segue to the substance of the matter. Here are six reasons why I don’t feel right about Operation Odyssey Dawn: 1) Just because Obama is a Democrat doesn’t mean the Constitution allows him to go to war without consulting Congress—there’s simply no excuse for violating the democratic principle of che…
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…ay after day after day, At noon and midnight, the cold was piercing. The sky was thick with black clouds that blocked out the sun. Fierce winds howled, snow swirled violently. Wild waves stormed heaven, buffeting monster fish. Walls trembled and shook, people shrieked in terror. Looking back at the past forty years, I now see that things were racing out of control: People had grown lax and indifferent. Forming factions and fighting among…
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…fore Jerry hit the riff, we the audience leapt into the air, thrown to the sky by a fountain not made by the hands of men. We spun around to look in the wides of each other’s eyes, mouths agape with awe, hair tossed wild, overwhelmed by the unmistakable, ineffable reality of Something Larger—an emergent property not reducible to the band, the crowd, or anything mortal. “Ripple,” penned by the band’s chief lyricist and official fifth member, Robert…
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…eft Behind series knows, that suddenly pilotless planes will fall from the sky and driverless cars will crash. So folks might want to be cautious about their transportation arrangements that day. The actual End of the World won’t be for another six months, according to Harold Camping, a San Francisco-area radio host and the owner of Family Radio. His web site, wecanknow.com, says that Oct. 21 will be the day “when He will destroy the world and all…
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…mstances. Sun Dial: A Mobile Call to Prayer application available for the iPhone assists Muslims around the world in participating in daily prayer by tracking “the sun’s gentle movement through the sky.” According to the designers of the app, the image-focused technology is a particularly important spiritual aid for Muslims practicing in the United States, most of whom don’t speak Arabic and for whom the practice of Islam in a religiously diverse…
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…ain” might have been my first song, too. I vaguely recall sometime late in high school asking a friend what band sang that song about Uncle John on the mixtape in her car stereo. When she filled me in, I thought, “Huh. So that’s the Grateful Dead. Maybe I have heard them before and didn’t realize it.” A year or so later, half-way through my freshman year of college in 1989, I went to my first Dead show near Chicago. I didn’t have a ticket (and did…
Read More…se, as the stars of a very dark and cold winter night slowly fade from the sky. Perhaps less obvious than the end of the old, the faint contours of something new are emerging counterpoising the death of the oh-so-very-tired. Visceral, extremely bloody and painful, new life is new life, to be celebrated in all its mewling imperfection. It signals new beginnings, new possibilities and new terrains. What form will new life take? What is the nature of…
Read More…at Gonzales sought inspiration from the Seven Directions, including Father Sky and Mother Earth, rather than “the God of the Bible.” The post seems to have been removed, and another perspective went up yesterday under the title “Why we shouldn’t justify killing Indians and taking their land.” At least it did in theory—clicking the link only brought up a blank page for me. This is a wonderland of bigotry and dizzy logic. Even ignoring the long and…
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