Religion Dispatches
…ep relevance for the life of faith.” While Benedict has had to deal with a number of volatile political and theological issues in recent years, it may have been the startling changes in communications technology that made the whole thing ultimately untenable. Since believers see the office of the Pope as God’s mouthpiece on Earth—God’s Twitter handle if you will—the new communications technologies have become increasingly worrisome, clogging the p…
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…odel? Conservative megachurches also have structure, money, and one-on-one contact. Many of them push self-esteem. But they steer their people to the right. During one summer when you were at Girls State, I took a road trip out West with your brother, and we drove past Ted Haggard’s megachurch. L: The one that they visit at the end of “Jesus Camp”? M: Yes, and we stopped to check it out. It’s the size of a smallish shopping mall. We saw the worshi…
Read More…g in the shops, or jammed in the tight lines to get food at the local restaurants. Nobody says to women to stay behind, keep out, or keep away. There is so much bodily contact a person could be mistaken for being at one with all humankind, and not a measurement of one’s gender….
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…arching for sweet bits of garbage? Sure we do—for now. The direct physical contact that most Americans today have with non-human animals is severely limited. There is no question that domesticated animals, like dogs, cats, and (the differently domesticated) rats exist in great abundance. We may not think about it much, but we can’t question the existence of animals such as cows and pigs that many of us eat. Perhaps, for most of us, there is little…
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…rchdiocese issued a letter to be read at each mass, urging parishioners to contact their political representatives to advocate against extending the statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases. This rhetoric of separation between the political and the religious arises again in Pope Francis’s recent apology for the atrocities committed by Catholics operating Canadian residential schools. As he expressed, “many Christians supported the colonizin…
Read More…of the goals of the Muslim Voices Festival: cultures are stronger when in contact with one another. You’ll often hear Muslim say that “Romeo and Juliet” came from the “Layla and Majnun” epic, or “Robinson Crusoe” from “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” or “Inferno,” from a miraj-namah. While these may be true in a technical sense of antecedents, it misses the larger picture of how we take and adapt from others. It also misses the point of how Muslims have taken…
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…nish conquistador, showing up on the banks of the Mississippi in the early contact with Native Americans there—which was violent and bloody. So there’s the killing and removal of Indigenous people in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia—all these Southeastern states that had Native American populations. In the early 1800s they began to be pushed off the land and then were forcibly pushed off the land [even more rapidly] under Andrew Jackson’s presidency….
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…es reported in 1990. Most women are infected with HIV through heterosexual contact and injection drug use. Women of color are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. AIDS is now the leading cause of death for black women ages 25 to 34. As a Center for Disease Control Fact Sheet puts it: Early in the epidemic, HIV infection and AIDS were diagnosed for relatively few women and female adolescents (although we know now that many women were infected w…
Read More…FA “gets its name on all of Mr. Lane’s events and adds to its database the contact information of all the pastors he organizes.” The AFA is known for its virulently anti-gay and anti-immigrant stances, and not just because its ongoing affiliation with the execrable Bryan Fischer. Former employees have recounted appalling conduct within the organization. On the other hand, as I reported last week, a growing number of evangelicals support immigratio…
Read More…classroom was) fading into an I-found-you relief followed by resolute eye contact, a strong handshake and a flash of acceptance—yes, it seemed to say, we are in this together—snapped decades of my inchoate antagonism toward the one of the baby boomers’ most celebrated gurus. Anyone not under a rock for the past 20 years knows who Williamson is. Since the 1980s, she has taught A Course in Miracles (ACIM), a how-to primer on self awareness and spir…
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