Religion Dispatches
…llow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is unique about the Arab world is the degree to which many dictatorships also oppress the majority. My point in that essay about Tunisia was that we in America and the West generally reflexively associate secularism with what is good and democratic, and conservatism (specifically, in Islam) with that which is antidemo…
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…who shot twelve, killing three, at a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs. It is in the deadly shootings of African Americans by police officers and in the militarization of police forces. These are all stories about men, but they reveal more than just that men are prone to violence. Instead, they tell us a great deal about contemporary masculinity, something we’ve explored as we’ve tried to understand how men make sense of themselves tod…
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…cess allowing for the renewal of natural lands. And fires such as Colorado Springs just experienced, while certainly natural disasters to a degree, are also man-made disasters, like the destruction leveled in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s just that our religious platitudes of God’s wrath, and God’s reassurance, make it difficult to understand the indispensable human contribution to these catastrophes. Tornado Hits the Heartland: Is God Punis…
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…ne a secret summit in 1994 at the Glen Eyrie conference center in Colorado Springs, Colorado where 55 fundamentalist Christians gathered to discuss the consequences of the “militant homosexual agenda.” What happened there? I compare it to the Nazis creating a solution for the Jews. These guys literally crafted a solution to the homosexual problem. The record of that conference, which was very secretive, wasn’t even released to the press. Somebody…
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…nds outrageous in the unapologetic, forthright discourse of Beck, however, springs from the unacknowledged or semi-conscious visions of a much larger segment of the population. I have never met Beck, but I knew him as a child. His name back then was Cleon Skousen, and we had his books. The two brains think alike. Skousen’s The Naked Communist (1958) presented a paranoid and simplistic case for the worldwide Soviet-Communist conspiracy, with pages…
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…who do such awful things. This is completely understandable, and it often springs from our noblest impulses—solidarity with victims of tragedy, anger at the perpetrator, and an inability to comprehend such a heinous act. Distancing ourselves from the shooter is a way of saying whom we stand with. The case for excommunication is even stronger with Alexis. Nonviolence is one of the core tenets of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has spent over fifty years…
Read More…Anonymous run the risk of undermining the type of civil disobedience that springs from love of one’s country, in favor of vengeful attacks that are the political equivalent of revenge porn. Drawing from the book of Psalms, Brueggemann suggests we have three possible responses to our own temptations toward vengeance: We can act it out; We can deny it—although it “usually comes out elsewhere”; or we can “hand off” our anger to God, just as a when a…
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…urch was the main patron of automata—elaborate mechanisms, often driven by springs, that were the precursors to present-day robots. “Not only did automata appear first and most commonly in churches and cathedrals, the idea as well as the technology of human-machinery was indigenously Catholic,” writes Stanford’s Jessica Riskin in her marvelous essay, “Machines in the Garden.” Automata, according to Riskin, “peopled the landscape of late medieval a…
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…ence in the antediluvian world, best represented by Cain’s murder of Abel, springs from the evil machinations of man. After the flood, God issues the first religious law. It’s about blood and ultimately about being responsible for the blood you shed (animal and human blood). When Darren Aronofsky’s Noah depicts the ground saturated with blood, he’s hit a major theme of the Genesis Flood. In Aronofsky’s cities of Cain, both animal and human blood r…
Read More…Heaven” news to their mom, Cassie is sitting at the kitchen table with headphones on, rocking out and ignoring all of it. Jokes aside, Heaven is for Real made me uneasy—although Pastor Burpo in real life spun the straw of Colton’s scanty “visions” into a fair amount of gold, what about the rest of the “hard working Americans” in Imperial, Nebraska? What about us all? We just have cool it down here, work really hard for little to no reward, and wai…
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