Religion Dispatches
…President campaign, and landed at Harvard the next year in time for the first student takeover. I was in SF during the summer of ’68, when chaos was simmering, and in Chicago in August of ’68 when chaos erupted. I did the dope and lived the life. The sixties, as they did so many of my generation, made me. But what I have since read in academic discourse is never the reality I experienced. That came through instead in the literature of the times, a…
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…olic) officiant: namely, a Christian representative of a tradition (like most Protestant denominations) that does not recognize the apostolic succession (implying that Peter was the first bishop of Rome, and that this Pope is his appointed successor), or the sacramental dignity of priestly ordination (meaning that it takes more to become a true minister of the gospel, and to remain one, than certain Texas-based websites suggest). So, no ecumenical…
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…But this outcome may well prove to be a form of secularism that even the most strident of secularists may have a hard time accepting. That is how deep the cultural commitment to such a social convention runs in the United States today. Jesus may not have been married, but he went to weddings and even blessed one with wine. But he did not marry himself, and the modern state would not have recognized his relationship with the mysterious Mary at all….
Read More…Rouge, Colorado City, Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Tucson, and Minneapolis) “weird,” while suggesting that the ad campaign is actually a strategy to pave the way for Mitt Romney’s 2012 run. Unlikely. (And anyone who thinks Mormons are placing all their eggs in Mitt Romney’s basket hasn’t heard of Jon Huntsman.) Meanwhile, progressive Church members themselves are trying to reconcile the new mormon.org image with…
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…n significance only to Easter. In Italian it is called Ferragosto, the August Festival. It is the feast of the assumption of a woman who is still remembered somewhat ironically as “the Virgin.” Of all the trappings of medieval Christendom with which the Protestant Reformers dispensed, none were erased in more thoroughgoing fashion than the celebration of the emphatically bodily femininity of Jesus’ mother. The Most Intense Kind of Poetry Just as s…
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…sterners with troubled souls; although this time we begin in St. Paul, not St. Louis. It happens that Patty is not a native Minnesotan (she’s from Westchester County), but she fits right in there with her lanky beauty as a former hoops star and her extreme neighborliness. Patty has become somewhat lost in her life and marriage, however, in part because of an unresolved obsession with Walter’s old Macalester College roommate, a handsome nihilist na…
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…e to which I keep returning. It offers a conclusion that brings me some chastened hope today: The most troublesome task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency. This is the lesson I hope our current president can bring himself to learn after this midterm election. Not more coddling of old and new right-running Republican legislators. There has been enough of that already, and he has reaped a bitter harvest. He has emb…
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…ept, and indulge in, mystery as a part of life.” But what he’s raging against most of all is not authority—scientific, artistic, or religious—but the lack of interest his fellow earthlings show in the world they inhabit. Too many of us value neither curiosity nor imagination. It’s what makes him choose the fairy tale as a writing device, and the Talmud as a muse. “Long ago, in a land far, far away” allows him to say what he feels he has to about w…
Read More…re black.” Later this month the “girls” of tea party nation are meeting in St. Louis for the “Smart Girl Summit.” Honestly, when I first read about the leadership training for conservatives at the website Smart Girl Politics and at the Smart Girl Summit, I thought it was leadership training for girls—probably homeschool and Christian school girls. No. Girls, as in adult females. Sponsors of Smart Girl Summit include tea party-oriented Freedom Work…
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…there’s also a drink for you. Evan Benn, the official beer taster for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, offered this: Stone Levitation Ale would be a no-brainer — a flavorful but not super strong craft beer that will help lift you up to meet your maker…Cocktail-wise, I don’t know if it fits the theme, but the drink that I’ve been seeing all over at fancy-schmancy cocktail bars is the Corpse Reviver No. 2. It’s a mix of gin, lemon juice and some other…
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