Religion Dispatches
…y now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want to bring back Niebuhr are conservatives. (I’m an admitted fanboy, but that’s about coming from the same church background as Niebuhr as much as anything.) And that doesn’t even get to the worst of it. Douthat misunderstands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic…
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…issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have cell phones and be on the Internet? If they forbid them, that’s going to be very tough, and if they permit them, they’re going to introduce a huge new force into the world of child rearing and education. Religious education is going to have to make some drastic shifts. And it’ll be interesting to see how it works. This is still hinged on belief. This next generation can be Musli…
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…ional or decadent. That said, Neiwert slams those who misuse the term for “cheap political theater,” writing that “inappropriate comparisons tend to obscure the reality of what’s taking place.” So what is the reality? Neiwert recently spoke with Religion Dispatches about violent rhetoric, imprecatory prayer, and eliminationism. Religion Dispatches: You begin the book talking primarily about the excesses of media personalities like Rush Limbaugh,…
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…ager for attention. The puppy piddled in the corner more than once, taking cheap shots at political adversaries (including McCain campaign apparatchiks) and using the annoying, sophomoric reference to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” Party. But Going Rogue was not unpleasant. The second book in the Sarah Palin œuvre, however, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, crosses the line from cute puppy bouncing on his back legs…
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…bauchery, but the parade tradition is about more than drunken tourists and cheap plastic beads. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parades began in 1857, with the Mistick Krewe of Comus, a secret society that wanted to emulate the Mardi Gras parades of Mobile, Alabama. From the start, Mardi Gras krewes were exclusive, elite clubs. Such organizations can be important networking opportunities in a small community like New Orleans, where people are used to doin…
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…Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the public to think more critically about what “religion” is. They are dire…
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…on deteriorated with the beginning of the second intifada in fall 2000 and cheap Palestinian labor became increasingly inaccessible due to curfews and roadblocks designed to prevent terrorist attacks. And they came, creating in the process a mosaic of cultural diversity. Most of Israel’s foreign workers (30 percent) came from Thailand but many migrated from the Philippines (18%), and from China (10%), Nepal (6%) and Romania (5%). They were willing…
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…aafa 21 quotes from a letter in which she wrote of the need for a “simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.” These words are noxious, but it’s also important to put them…
Read More…the reductive “purity” rhetoric with something reductive of my own, like a cheap criticism that Christianity is anti-sex and anti-body. Which brings me to Augustine’s Confessions, and specifically, reading Augustine’s Confessions with my Intro Theology class this week. Internet, I love Augustine Confessions. I love, love, love, love Augustine’s Confessions. I love it even when I want to throw it across the room and curse. It’s a complicated love,…
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…cts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that…
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