Religion Dispatches
…assent. It is to easy to blame the Shoah on Hitler; this too denies the existence of a vast army of “willing executioners.” And it is too easy to blame Rick Warren, or else to fear him or demonize him. It is the culture of blind assent that is the real culprit here, the almost casual erosion of our finest democratic habits. I aspire to a critical left in this country that is religiously fluent enough to be able to talk about these things with a ma…
Read More…like al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman Zawahiri, however, see jihad as a holy war. Just last week, the nefarious Egyptian doctor posted “general guidelines for jihad” on several online forums, as if he, of all people, is the authoritative voice for defining such things. Absurdly, for many people on the right, he is, the authoritative voice. Graham and others employ the term precisely in a way that legitimizes that understanding and gives currency to such us…
Read More…abandonment of conservative principles that led to the Party’s deserved ouster in last November’s elections. The Party of limited government and fiscal responsibility became the administrator of massive police actions around the globe and the custodian of record deficits here at home. That is not conservative, they note with dismay; it is radical. That’s the more sober reflection of a more sober sector of the Republican coalition. The deafening s…
Read More…ng the rule of law (conceived and defended primarily as a defense of our system against unprecedented violent attack). The utilitarian calculus in play seems to compute one person’s egregious suffering as counting far less in the ultimate balance than the exponential gain in “saving thousands, perhaps millions, of lives” (See Ticking Time Bomb above). The utilitarian cannot calculate or measure things like “sacred value,” and it is ironically some…
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…so was Dorwin Stoddard. Phyllis Scheck was 79. Bill Badger, the man who first wrestled Jared Lee Loughner to the ground even after he had been shot himself, was 74. Even Gifford’s assistant, Gabriel “Gabe” Zimmermann, was 30. This was not a young crowd. But Christina Taylor Green was young—just nine years old. And she bears additional symbolic significance for us, because she was born on September 11, 2001 (curiously, Loughner’s birthday is Septem…
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…d than they are to orthodoxy. The reason for that takes us to the second most striking thing about nineteenth and twentieth century apocalyptic thought (and yes, now twenty-first century thought… it just keeps on going). The main idea is that there’s something deeply wrong with the world. It is not our home and we are not at home in it. We are merely sojourners here, biding our time until we step off into that great journey that will take us to a…
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…s and others to win. What had been achieved? I passed a little park on Christopher Street where the colors were especially striking and some anonymous gardener had managed to capture every color from the rainbow. That strange new urban art form—statues depicting real people, statues who appear to be seated, alone or in groups, on park benches and stones—the ones here depicted images of subtle complexity. All the statues were white, bleached white….
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…se, WI (his home diocese) from 1995-2004. He was elevated to Archbishop of St. Louis in 2004 before Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI summoned him to Rome to serve as prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial authority in the Catholic Church (apart from the pope himself). He clashed early on with Pope Francis, expressing his displeasure in numerous media outlets with the agenda of the Pope’s synod on the f…
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…ts to maintain his moral standing. In 1948 Graham and his newly-formed ministry established four rules of conduct intended to protect themselves from the appearance of various forms of sexual, financial, and leadership misconduct. What has now come to be known as the Billy Graham Rule resurfaced in the wake of the 2016 election. Vice President Mike Pence, like Graham before him, refuses to be alone with a woman. Graham and his leadership team arti…
Read More…brated in the area, though the grounds now constitute a museum (and a tourist destination). But of Easter, there was almost nothing to see in this nominally Catholic region of an emphatically Catholic country. Breakfasting on Saturday morning in the pueblo, I asked our hosts if there were a festival of any kind that evening. “For what?” they asked, perplexed. “Easter,” I replied. They shrugged casually and returned to the kitchen. The next morning…
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