Religion Dispatches
…be here. And he wants you to hurry up and have those American babies, because if you don’t, we’ll run out of workers, and if we run out of workers the United States will get “knocked off its global perch.” Because that’s what’s at stake, ladies and gentlemen—American domination. So, my (heterosexual) compatriots, take off your clothes, take off your condoms, take out your IUDs and diaphragms, stop swallowing your birth control pills, have your va…
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…lms like Fight Club or the latest Batman flick: utopian idealists who will use any means, including violence, to bring about the transformation they seek. In practice, though, they tend to be mostly harmless. I once had a noted New Age peace activist tell me that, because all spiritual practice has ripple effects outward, “my cat is a contemplative contributor to the universe.” I swear I’m not making that up. The reasoning (if that’s what it is) i…
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…overnment went so far as to block all access to Twitter in the country because of objections to “blasphemous content.” The IHEU reports being contacted by an increasing number of secularist groups organizing on Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious ha…
Read More…us organizations protested that this four-pronged test would only exempt houses of worship, but not, say, a church that served people of different faiths through a soup kitchen. Under the new proposed rule (which is still subject to a public comment period), an employer seeking an exemption would only have to meet the forth prong of the test, thus widely expanding the universe of organizations that would qualify for the exemption. The exemption do…
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…ry Institute has run away from a school board after members there actually used the word “creationism.” Because of his recent response in American Spectator to the Livingston Parish School Board, I compared Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman to Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robin. As the song goes, “when danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.” Some folks at DI must have taken umbrage. But Mr. Klinghoffer also took ex…
Read More…l of people, one of whom was Governor Haley Barbour: Few politicians today use outright race baiting, but we see the symbols some use and the phrases they utter and everyone knows what the code is—what really is being said. Oh, and he’s also called attention to how voter ID laws endanger the voting rights of poor and elderly people, and was named a Champion of Justice by the Mississippi Center for Justice. Yep. Classic Dick Molpus. May his tribe i…
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…ears later. “The city has blood on its hands. Dr. Tiller wasn’t killed because he was a doctor, but because the city allowed it to get out of hand.” The debate in the years between touched many people in Wichita. Mary Harren, the local representative of Catholics for Choice in Wichita, says that half of her extended family stopped talking to her when she came out as pro-choice. And, though she remains a devout Catholic, she says she hasn’t been to…
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…re, what, and what now?—demands a serious response, leading to a highly focused narrative account of one’s life. This storytelling is what one critic has termed an advanced literary exercise, a “re-editing” of the self in which one narrative, a life to come, was traced over another, a life already lived. Yes, this is literary drama. Yet what we have in the Spiritual Exercises is a textual practice minus the page: it is the individual life that f…
Read More…our guns. It would take a lot of the guns that we now own away from us because they are not suitable for sporting use, and they would register all the rest. Since registration has never solved a crime in Canada, or in Hawaii, where they have registered handguns since the ‘30s, I wonder what they want that registration list for. I think most of the rest of the world has experienced what they want it for. It’s a grab list when the government decides…
Read More…never be discovered embezzling money, enjoying kinky sex, or (The Da Vinci Code notwithstanding) fathering surprise children. It’s not necessary to label something a “cult” to understand the potential peril involved in looking to a living guru. However honest and virtuous that guru might be, she—like the rest of us—is susceptible to tripping and falling right up until the day she dies. What makes some folks willing and able to trust in a charismat…
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