Religion Dispatches
…ut the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedom to own a gun are at odds. Someone will have to win and someone will have to lose. I mean this quite literally. The only way to have meaningful gun control will be to vote people out of…
Read More…ong after, the former acquaintance called to threaten Subhi from a Turkish phone number. Power noted that Subhi spoke at a recent UN Security Council Session, the first-ever dedicated to LGBT rights, which she said was an important precedent to set: But also, it allowed us to convey, in a single voice, and with the authority of the Security Council – which is the premiere global enforcement body for peace and security – it allowed us to convey tha…
Read More…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….
Read More…party types who will now turn out enthusiastically. It adds pizzazz to the ticket. An ideological firebrand is the one thing Romney has never been accused of being, and now he can borrow that heat. I believe that Romney or the people close to him pushed Romney for some of these reasons—including getting past the Mormon moment and the focus on Romney’s character. The persistent question about Romney has been: who is this man? What made him who he i…
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…tched around several city blocks, districts that were used to double-digit numbers were overwhelmed with thousands of participants, and the vast majority were adamant Sanders supporters. The night was unprecedented in the modern Mormon world. https://twitter.com/sltrib/status/710953531021221888 Close observers expected the “Mormon Vote” to go Sanders’s way—the latest polling had him up eight points, Sanders held huge rallies in both states, and Hi…
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…battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America didn’t really start in earnest until the early 1900s. For the most part, Christians were not biblical literalists and accepted science—including the ideas that the earth was very old and that living creatures changed through time. A typic…
Read More…th us. Tap your toes with us. And as Phil says, get “HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY.” Ticket prices range from $100 for an individual seat to $10,000 for a “Commander” table. Last year, Robertson’s homophobic remarks to GQ magazine, along with his assertion that blacks were “happy” before the civil rights era, caused a temporary suspension of Duck Dynasty by the A&E network, and an outcry of so-called persecution from the family’s conservative supporters. In…
Read More…o go awry as soon as I arrived at the Met. I had pre-purchased my entrance ticket and the audio tour, only to find out that there was no audio tour. Things did not improve. I started in the Byzantine galley where five gold and silver metal mesh Versace dresses were on display, only they were placed above eye level, making it feel like I was peeking up the mannequins’ skirts. I see London, I see France, I see Versace’s underpants. The crush of peop…
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…Joe Biden impersonation can’t compensate for this defect at the top of the ticket. No number of morally-impassioned surrogates can compensate. We should not forget that a widely-shared yearning for a moral revolution formed the heart of the Sanders movement. We shouldn’t forget that this surge of moral energy surprised the Vermont senator himself, or that it was really a remarkable thing to behold, especially considering the many liabilities of th…
Read More…t, help the least of these all you want, but nothing you do will buy you a ticket to heaven. You can do all these things and be ever so nice, but if you don’t believe Jesus died for your sins, you’re going to hell.” To those who feel that way I say this: Call those pursuing social justice in this world heretics and deface billboards if it makes you feel better about neglecting the poor and suffering. But I think that Jesus could give two flips abo…
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