Religion Dispatches
…your mortgage does NOT have to be paid off in order to go. People get confused by this, because one of the pre-conditions is that one must be debt-free. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an amount due against my credit card (or my mortgage, if I still had one), but it means I have keep my payments up in accordance to my agreements. No overdue amounts. I’ve done my mock packing. What is mock packing, you ask? Well, for this trip I have almost all new…
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…he country. And we are seeing some clear signs that they may be willing to use whatever means necessary to protect that ownership. Yes, because now it’s definitely not just about punching above their weight. They have these aggressive networks pushing state-level legislation, they have an even wilder dominionist theology, and they have this incredible unrelenting zeal… We are certainly crossing over into something quite different with this overtly…
Read More…nsubstantiated claims such as “when you give money to groups that not only promote contraception but also promote abortion in an integrated way, you actually drive abortion rates up, not down.” Since 2000, Alvaré has taught law and brought her own brand of cherry-picked data tendentiously linked to the supposed dangers of abortion and contraception wrapped up as concern for women’s health and well-being to the Robert George/Witherspoon Institute/N…
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…Six—”The Brand”—but there’s no discussion of the work done to prop up and promote this charisma by the throngs of volunteers who provided free labor by serving the church as team members in worship; technology; media production; marketing and publicity; community groups; children’s ministry; women’s ministry; men’s ministry; security; building maintenance; facility multiplication; and hours spent outside of formal church service in a variety of w…
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…participants are encouraged to give their resources, time, and creativity freely to one another. Event organizers also consistently refuse all offers of corporate sponsorship, believing that it would be antithetical to their vision for the event to do so. On the flipside, this means that participants and others sometimes misconstrue the “gift economy” ethos as requiring Burning Man organizers to refrain entirely from engaging in the real-world m…
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…s of abortion rights and LGBTQ inclusion, can obtain “get out of criticism free” cards simply because they are outspoken opponents of Christian nationalism. Clearly we need better language to address anti-democratic Christian beliefs. So how does one responsibly cover Christian nationalists these days? To begin with, we must find language that doesn’t allow for the easy whitewashing of “respectable” Christians who hold authoritarian theological be…
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…ets and advertisers all play with the tensions, conflicts and frustrations between black and white people. They use racial antagonism to boost ratings, to draw attention to their products and to keep viewers. We are constantly afflicted by the media with yet another “conversation” between opposing racial viewpoints that yields no light and generates no new ideas. Its only purpose is to increase our consumptive desire for more such interactions. We…
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…rent goal: restoration. “If you think restoration is impossible that’s because you’re lazy because you’re not willing to read, you don’t read books.” Echoing DeMuth’s concerns about “fertility,” Hazony speaks directly to the—largely male—audience: Young men: get a young woman, join a church, go to a place where the great inheritance is being handed down, […] or join a synagogue. If there is no church like that in your state, move to a different st…
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…dy else. And when it concerns science and technology, the more you do, the better. Morphological freedom is an attractive concept, and I agree that we should be open to thinking about new relationships between technology and humanity. Personally I don’t believe that there’s any one morally correct way to be human, or that technology is essentially good or evil, but many critics of transhumanism, I think, fear that technology will alter some vision…
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…merican spiritual traditions meant, at best, affirming a moral equivalency between enslaved and free persons, so as to disavow the notion that oppressed people’s spiritual traditions were superior in value to the religious faiths of human traffickers. Take Hebrew Israelism, for example, the primary spiritual tradition embraced by the authors of this article. When writers outside of our community add the unique problem of ortho-ethnicity (right peo…
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