Religion Dispatches
…ttery-powered radio and learn that what we had heard was a power station on 14th Street, about eight blocks away, blowing up. The narrow stairway of our fifth story walk-up is pitch black. Our phones have no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon,…
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…knew it was over. I got a phone call. It was about midnight on October 23, 1998. I thought it was my husband calling to say he would be late. It was my stepfather saying, “I have some bad news.” I thought, “My mother or my sister?” He said, “Your uncle Bart has been shot and killed.” For a brief, bright moment, all I was, was relieved. A mother of an 18-year-old girl who died in the massacre at Columbine got her news by radio. She was pulling int…
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…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…
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…fornia, and then to what came to be called the “New Christian Right” of the 1970s and 1980s. Communism disappeared from the enemies list after 1989 (except for older Christian Right stalwart David Noebel, who keeps even that faith while leading the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade even into his retirement), but Islam, an economic “New World Order,” the “gay agenda,” the always-present secular humanists and feminists, and numerous other threats aro…
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…go a long way toward repairing the economic system. (Glass-Steagall was the 1933 law, repealed in 1999, which mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking activities; its repeal led to the financial services products that were central to the catastrophic economic collapse of 2008.) Actions with Consequences In the main, the sign listing the Occupy DC goals was heavier on wonkery than anarchism; albeit laden with some highly general…
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…sun was only one of many tied to the stake and burned. The Crusades. Until 1961, atheists weren’t allowed to serve on a US jury. Women are dying of AIDS in Africa because condoms make baby Jesus sad. In Utah, 45% of homeless teenagers are Mormons. Female genital mutilation. A famous comic book artist she knows was told that he wouldn’t be able to draw in heaven. “I’ve touched on 1/100 of the things about religion that piss me off,” Christina sa…
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…r, unnecessary, and unacceptable spectacle of a hanging captured on a cell phone. If there is something that should distinguish us from those dictators who have corrupted our world, it must be here. In humility before death. In appreciation of our common humanity. In the sense that the universe is infused with a law and a purpose that makes our lives and hopes sacred, and which, from time to time, turns against those who offend it, to remind us th…
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…people to this moment in time. Some players will have seen the shaky cell phone videos of Qaddafi’s discovery now circulating, with all the bumps and blurs you’d expect from someone filming a violent attack close up. The horrifying footage shows the dictator’s last moments, complete with flashes of faces splattered with blood, punctuated with off-screen shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” and revealing glimpses of Qaddafi’s pummeled and resigned visage blu…
Read More…” The Washington Post reports this morning that Democratic Senators, on a phone call yesterday with White House senior advisor David Plouffe, argued against adopting the Bishops’ position. My source says it’s “not a done deal” yet, but expected action from the White House within a week. UPDATE: Another womens’ rights advocate tells me that she has “no reason to think” that the Obama administration feels it “owes” the Bishops for health care refo…
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…e a video of the performance, despite a Secret Service prohibition on cell phones, because Makana’s guitar is tuned with a smartphone app. Or, reporters are interested in how Obama, his guests, and security detail responded—or didn’t, as it turned out. But this misses the heart of the story, as Makana’s set at the APEC dinner was less dissenting performance than performative utterance—the songs he played, the protest t-shirt hidden beneath the com…
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