Religion Dispatches
…lyptic race war. If Roof did not read The Turner Diaries, he certainly had contact with people who had. In the days after the attack on the A.M.E. Church, discussion focused on how Roof’s actions were related to a wider culture of racism, both in South Carolina and throughout American society. It seems that within the culture of racist apocalypticism there is a division of labor between dreamers and doers, prophets and martyrs. Numerous hate crime…
Read More
…to speak for the gods were actually experiencing demonic possession. In the 19th century Spiritualism became popular and many Christians claimed that the “ghosts” appearing at séances were actually demons. When the Ouija board became popular after World War I, the Catholic Church made efforts to suppress “experimenting” with the board. So it is hardly surprising that Catholic priests, including the famous exorcist Jose Antonio Fortea, have condemn…
Read More
…al to a Canadian mother (who had come to India as a Christian missionary in 1946) and an English-Burmese father who reared him as an evangelical Christian, in 1989 at the age of 34, Mendies was found guilty of “proselytizing” (in this case, placing bibles in Nepali hotel rooms) and spent six months in Kathmandu’s Central Jail, where he shared a cell with 17 other prisoners. Nepal’s intensely complicated political heritage has been aptly described…
Read More…anxiety, and Biblical prophecy. Rael allegedly encountered space aliens in 1973, who warned him that humanity had entered the “Age of Apocalypse” following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Possibly inspired by writers like Erich Von Daniken, Rael announced that the Elohim–a name for God used in the Hebrew Bible–were actually aliens who created humanity “in their image” using advanced genetics. Prior to Rael, the Elohim employed num…
Read More
…e personally,” in this case, means “knowing someone who has regular social contact with people possessing masters and doctoral degrees and/or large Twitter followings and/or several published books to their credit”? Too, it’s not as though everyone involved knew Gissendaner and counted her as a friend: some, like me, were friends with people who knew her, and their pain—maybe unavoidably?—lent urgency to Gissendaner’s case. At the same time, I don…
Read More…bit misleading; Lane, after all, has been around working the room since the 1990s. The “new” moniker is meant to distinguish him from the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell generation, although it’s really less of a generational difference than an organizational one. Lane, Horowitz reminds us, thrives on networks of local support, built on the dedication of individual pastors. Robertson and Falwell (and Ralph Reed, still, through his Faith and Freedom Co…
Read More
…was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from the The Twilight Zone‘s first season, aliens discover that they can conquer Earth most easily by using flickering lights to infuse paranoia and fear in its human inhabitants. They found that communities thus charged would turn on each other and the human race would self-destr…
Read More…’ offices pretty much go directly in the trash. They pay more attention to phone calls and letters, but street protests don’t bother them at all, unless they’re on cable news, which they almost never are. Hashtags? Changing your Twitter avatar? Forget about it. Popular protest does play a supporting role in getting us to a point where something like the Congressional sit-in works. So do the organizations—including the religious groups—who sponsor…
Read More
…in the “real” physical environment of the player, as mediated through the phone’s camera. As one player told a reporter: “This is full on escapism, where I’m like ‘let me just go catch some Pokémon and ignore the news.’” What news is she talking about? The murders of Sterling and Castile and the Dallas police officers. She is referring to the news of death. But in a matter of days Pokemon Go has changed our relationship with death. This is new te…
Read More
…ultural events “Petersburg reserve.” And the next date was proposed again – 11 July.When submitting notification of July 11, and that day was busy event in support of the traditional family and President Putin.Kryukov offered 12 July and activists agreed again. But the July 12 all the Campus Martius was busy. Puerto Rico: Communities mourn Orlando victims The Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers reports on families and communities in Puerto Rico mour…
Read More