Religion Dispatches
…his own sought-after religious leaders and the positions of the president. Last year, he came under fire for meeting with the American Bible Society president “to begin a dialogue on the importance of the Bible in the founding of the country.” In 2010, the White House refused to comment on DuBois’ phone call to religious right ideologue David Jeremiah after the latter called the president “a dangerous person” moving the country toward “socialism.”…
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…ces like Tehran, or Athens, or Beijing, that are armed and enabled by cell phone technology and the almost instantaneous circulation of striking images of authoritarian crackdown, impossible to contain or control. There is an old philosophical quandary posed as follows: can a fish imagine water? Similarly, Religion Dispatches exists within the very medium that it is simultaneously attempting to theorize. It is as global as the instruments it use…
Read More…es about the Proposition 8 debate—or any other controversial issue—in the class she taught each week. Facing the prospect of being denied access to the temple and resigning her Sunday School position, she decided to take the video down. But all that changed last Sunday. As she sat at her computer, Melanie S. realized that her decision to take her video down had not strengthened but rather bruised her relationship to her faith. In yielding to press…
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…a’s auto-da-fé came not only in the comments section, but in nasty emails, phone calls, and demands for his firing from Messiah College. As he discovered, the culture wars are real, and practiced even on those (like Fea) who largely have been critical of Obama’s actual implementation of his promises about faith-based policies. More important than these blogosphere wars, however, is understanding something deeper about these screeds about Obama as…
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…ncy created in December to tighten his control of the media. Kiselyov said last year that if gay people die in an accident, their hearts should be burned or buried so that they could not be transplanted. The Human Rights campaign released an animated video about the role American evangelical activists have played in promoting anti-gay policies in Russia. Dominican Republic: Religious resistance to gay ambassador We reported last week on the respon…
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…force us to leave,” Robertson concluded. “I felt the full weight of their fear, and where there is such fear, we can be certain that there is no possibility of love. Phone calls and an email inquiry to representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention were not returned….
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…don’t involve Miller’s own research, and, despite the dubious sourcing, a number of Miller’s claims are persuasive. There is evidence—much of it from Miller’s own, peer-reviewed work—that self-reported spiritual experience lowers the risk for substance abuse, depression, and unprotected sex among adolescents. There’s also plenty of evidence that adolescents can use spiritual experiences and techniques to navigate emerging adulthood, a process Mil…
Read More…ist that building floors are very porous membranes indeed. The money, like the guilt, flows freely. The mystery deepens in the case of a man like Bernie Madoff, because he so mysteriously found a way to have it both ways. The offices on the 19th floor were transparent. They were walls of glass. But Bernie Madoff designed them with a special feature: he could hit a button, and the glass would miraculously turn white, like a wall. “Now you see it, n…
Read MoreI just got off the phone with Nancy Ratzen, president of the National Council of Jewish Women, who said the group would be issuing an endorsement of Elana Kagan later today. Ratzen, who said the NCJW has, since 2001, “engaged consistently on reviewing and taking positions and educating and mobilizing progressive Jewish community” on judicial nominations, said that the group would be working hard to see Kagan confirmed. “We think she has an except…
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…to atheism than its more dismissive predecessors. RD spoke with Maguire by phone about his latest book and the future of belief. What was the impetus for undertaking this after a long career as a priest and theologian who was once a believer? I started out as the absolute true believer. I believed everything the Vatican taught. One of the things that helped me was working in a parish. I started to meet real people and to discover that some of the…
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