Religion Dispatches
…and my ultimate displeasure) surrounds the story of Tiana, a hardworking African American young woman, and Prince Naveen, a handsome ne’er-do-well prince searching for a sugar momma to marry. Through his interaction with a voodoo priest, Dr. Facilier (character traits: sly and dastardly), Prince Naveen is turned into a frog and, unfortunately, turns Tiana into a frog too by asking her for a kiss to break the spell. No surprises here. The surprises…
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…ny analyst and former official with a view on Tibet and China could fire a cheap shot. The Indian government’s assertiveness vis-à-vis China is refreshing (though achieving it at the expense of refugees and Buddhist monks who fled China at 14 to get an education smacks of bad taste.) The affair has also unsettled the sentiments of those living in India’s predominantly Buddhist Himalayan region, which separates China from India. There were large pr…
Read More…minated by a secular Ba’ath party. Yet, as I wrote, the New York Times, America’s leading newspaper, irresponsibly confused religiosity with a lack of receptivity to democracy. (Then again, if you’re the majority, of course you’d support democracy—a principled stand is sometimes a partisan stand.) Following the latest in the Egyptian military’s unprovoked assaults on civilian protesters, who reasonably enough are furious with the cancellation of t…
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…third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbers are 14% and 40% respectively, etc). The crisis has already condemned low-income families to a shocking level of food insecurity, with one-fifth of American kids now at risk of going to bed hungry each night. Many of those forced to work—especially women of color—will sicken and die in a too-rapid “reopening” aimed at saving businesses…
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…ils does not mean that I’m accusing him of being somehow immune to all empirical evidence or all reason. Rather, another type of reasoning is at play here: modern humans are plagued by meaninglessness and alienation; this alienation is due to the rise of atheism and atheistic explanations of human life and origins; and therefore the end of atheism and the rise of theism will mark the end of meaninglessness and alienation. It is this line of reason…
Read More…Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap….
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…re as harsh as those of Arizona and Alabama here in the United States. Thousands of illegal African workers will lose their jobs before being detained in the desert until deportation. When I saw William in January, he was hoping to go back to Sudan with the assistance of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. He was planning to make a new home in Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan. He told me his chance to finish an education has passe…
Read More…d self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his po…
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…, ’80s and ’90s to reduce state support for higher education and induce Americans to take out loans so that they might have ‘skin in the game.’ This was part of a larger agenda to degrade the social infrastructure of public life, as policymakers traded easy credit and access to cheap consumer goods for high wages and a measure of economic security. It is no coincidence that all of this took shape in the wake of the civil rights movement, the fract…
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…quite literally rather be in the briefing room being grilled by CNN’s Jim Acosta But of course Sanders, like the rest of the Trump administration, cares nothing about Christianity, or its central Easter story of atonement, humiliation, resurrection, and hope. For her and for Trump, even a benign and “timeless” tradition like the White House Easter Egg roll is nothing more than another opportunity to signal to the base: we are mighty, we are strong…
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