Religion Dispatches
…en in hijab, plenty not. A parking lot with Range Rovers, Audis, and a high-end Benz, the kind with gull-wing doors. I cannot afford this world. But I get it. The patrons of a place like Huqqa don’t venerate Ataturk. His regime persecuted them, drove them into hiding, forced them to dissimulate, and punished those who dared raise their heads. This, more than anything, shapes how Erdogan continues to see the protests—or, rather, his failure to see…
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…evement on standardized tests: as if we do not already have enough teaching-to-the-test going on, and as if America’s public school teachers were not already anxious enough about retaining their jobs and delivering good results. No one is suggesting that US public education is not in need of serious research-based innovation; the question is whether staging a race by dangling $3.6 billion dollars over the heads of freaked-out and desperate state a…
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…. The news story spills into sports, financial, and talk shows with the not-so-hidden subtext of retribution. The perception that a wrong needs to be righted plays out on the Buccaneers’ sports field, the stock market, and Backtalk with Baxter. But the reality of the tragedy remains hidden and no one—not the police, nor the reporters nor the families involved—seems interested in sussing it out. In each instance, using, pursuing, or bowing to perce…
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…ses the state of Israel indisputable. All was good until the proverbial fly-in-the-buttermilk was discovered with news that an ethnic group from South Africa called the Lemba, who maintained their own oral history of Jewish ancestry, was found to possess the same genetic markers as mainstream (read: White) Jews. As fast as the initial news story broke, attempts to explain the presence of “Semitic” genes in a group of Black Africans arose that were…
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…t resonates deeply with lived human experience. A true myth brings one face-to-face with reality and has nothing to do with literalism or the ignoring of scientific evidence. To get to my point: There is found in each of these excerpts, a disconnect between the author’s idea of Christianity and what Christianity actually is. Admittedly, these comments may have been written off-the-cuff and perhaps there was not time or space to elaborate fully, bu…
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…e and Evgeny Morozov proud. D.A.V.I.D.’s main role, then, may be as an easy-to-publicize provocateur. SES took the robot to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention this summer, and D.A.V.I.D. will be making an appearance at SES’s National Conference on Apologetics this October, where it’s delivering part of Staley’s talk—and where it’ll receive billing as a speaker. In this role, D.A.V.I.D. has a lot in common with Samantha, the digi…
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…roared its approval. Everyone appeared to agree with the pick for this one-time prize. In making the award the moderator said that the choice was obvious. Speaking to the converted, Dawkins used the occasion to comment on how he deals with theists. Noting that he is often accused of abusing creationists, for example, Dawkins stressed that he calls their ideas stupid, not them. Individual creationists may simply be ignorant, insincere, or insane,…
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…pan (check), and cut to the final credits. But this massive theological cop-out doesn’t really work. Since the angels possess a written copy of God’s plan, there’s no way to know ex ante whether Norris’ disobedience is All Part Of The (Meta-)Plan or just plain old disobedience. At one crucial moment in the film, Norris looks into his beloved’s eyes and says “this just can’t be wrong.” Certainly, this is an experience I can relate to, as can anyone…
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…al suffering and want became the measure of virtuous public policy. Welfare-to-work transition support operations functioned as the modern equivalent of Victorian workhouses, designed to instill exemplary behaviors like punctuality and better personal hygiene and grooming. Tough-on-dependency politicians, like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, were lionized in the big media while the voices of dissidents like Derrick Bell an…
Read More…e public.” Her most visible campaign, titled ‘Our Faces’, targets young, in-the-closet Israelis who perceive a contradiction between religious observance and homosexuality. The campaign, launched two years ago, produces and ublicizes headshot collages of headshots of members of Israel’s Orthodox LGBT community in newspapers and online. Ghana: President slammed for suggesting anti-LGBT attitudes may someday evolve President Nana Akufo-Addo said in…
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