Religion Dispatches
…he first sliver of a crescent moon is sighted, it marks the beginning of a new month (or a new year). Some Muslims have adopted calculation in advance, choosing to figure out the months well in advance. Makes it easier to plan. Others, myself included, like to wait up all night to hear word. If anyone across the Americas has in fact spotted that first crescent, then we enter Ramadan. The last day of Ramadan ends with the next crescent moon, markin…
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…ics Too often, major Apostles and Prophets of the NAR are misidentified in news stories and magazine articles as pastors or evangelists. While they may be those things as well, the failure to more precisely recognize the nature of their leadership and their church offices is a hefty understatement, and promotes critical misunderstandings of their roles. It’s like referring to Roman Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan as a Catholic priest. He is certai…
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…n the language so that it had—not playfulness, but just, “this is the best new evidence. This is the best new story we got going now.” Here’s the critique: that, “the universe is expanding” is a very loose way of talking about love or personal development. It’s a superficial connection between things that are substantially different. If the metaphor breaks down, [at least] I took a valiant effort at connecting a few things. Malcolm Gladwell, who e…
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…e new mass of it surfacing in California. From its earliest days, many of New Thought’s leading teachers and practitioners and promoters were women, which is not to say that women are more credulous but which is to say that women may well experience more suffering in an androcentric America. What was first called New Thought in William James’s time came to be known as New Age thinking toward the end of the 20th century (Mark Oppenheimer’s profi…
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…t influential positions were as Director of the Simon Guggenheim Museum in New York (1952-1960); he was there when the new building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright opened, though he was ambivalent about it, worrying that the space was designed to promote the architect, not a spiritual experience of inner space. And then he served as Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (1961-1967). The shows Sweeney curated, the work he collected, and the…
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…st ambitions in completely undoing the premises and core principles of the New Deal and the postwar social compact. They accomplished this feat in just 30 years of concerted effort. Andersen shows us how they did it through sins of commission but also sins of omission: quietly declining to renew key regulatory provisions, dropping cost-of-living indexing for recipients of various public benefits, letting the real value of the federal minimum wage…
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…rom a non-religious perspective. His outlook is grim. Nature is dangerous. New technologies are creating even more vectors for disaster. And some apocalypse-minded religious groups, Torres argues, might harness those new technologies in order to manufacture their own end-of-days. Plus, there could be aliens. While reading The End, I spent a lot of time wondering whether Torres was prescient or nuts. Much to his credit,Torres is happy to discuss bo…
Read More…rding to the blog PimpPreachers.com, a group of protesters were “Occupying New Birth” and demanding that Long leave the church he has pastored since 1997. At its peak, New Birth boasted 25,000 members, a figure that sank as Long was accused of sexual abuse and assault by young male congregants last year, claims Long settled in secret in May. The Occupy group passed out flyers which read, “The People must rise up and occupy the pulpits, the tithe…
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…ld wager, they’re likely restricted to conservative Christian schools like New Saint Andrews). Women have purpose within this patriarchal framework—at least that’s the presentation. But those of us who’ve lived through Christian patriarchy can attest that this is not how it plays out in reality. So when I see Eve in Exile as the next best thing for women in Christian fundamentalist circles, I’m concerned that Rebekah Merkle, instead of promoting a…
Read More…ave suffered a string of defeats in recent years, potentially reigniting culture wars that many liberals had hoped were all but over. It may not be your father’s Christian right, with new players and new tactics, but it’s still the Christian right and it is more empowered than its been since the glory days of Ronald Reagan….
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