Religion Dispatches
…force us to leave,” Robertson concluded. “I felt the full weight of their fear, and where there is such fear, we can be certain that there is no possibility of love. Phone calls and an email inquiry to representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention were not returned….
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…le’s boosters promise that the town has enough bed-and-breakfasts and cell phone towers to transform the eclipse into a comfortable tourist experience, there is a fundamental strangeness to the whole affair that no amount of merchandizing can fully defang. That it’s hard to reduce the weirdness of things like the eclipse hasn’t stopped Hopkinsville from trying. More than a half-century ago, on Monday, August 22, 1955, news media around the country…
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…Montreal in August. A new international coalition, the Global LGBTQI Francophone Initiative” is in the process of coming together and working together “to end governmental and societal repression of sexual and gender minorities.” A U.S. vote against a United Nations resolution condemning the death penalty for “same-sex relations” and other acts provoked widespread outrage, leading U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley to tweet, “Fact: There was…
Read More…t the People’s Party, which held the decisive vote. “I couldn’t turn on my phone when the text bomb hit the ceiling owing to the never-ending messages,” a People’s Party lawmaker said on condition of anonymity. Some lawmakers were summoned by pastors of megachurches in their electoral districts. Lawmakers from the conservative Liberal Korea Party are also working with Christian activists to push an effort to remove protections against discriminati…
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…verything we’ve been doing for the last 10 years,” Sinno says, speaking by phone from a recent tour stop in San Francisco. “A big part of what we do and why we address politics and gender and class and whatever – be that through our music and through our positions in the public eye – a big part of that is about trying to create sort of a cultural roster for people to identify with and feel emboldened by. And it felt like for a few days, we had to…
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…bout the cover? I love the cover. I took that picture myself (with my cell phone), and the press did a great job with the layout. The picture is of a hallway in Dystopia Haunted House, a big haunted attraction in Denmark. I’m doing some scientific consulting for them and have also done two large-scale quantitative research projects on recreational fear in the haunt, so it seemed only appropriate to use an image of one of their sets. It’s atmospher…
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…e world’s Catholics were in Europe, but by the middle of this century that number will fall “to perhaps a sixth.” Geography is not destiny, but it is only natural that prelates from one part of the world will tend to speak for the traditions with which they are most familiar, which might well differ considerably from other regions. We saw early signs of this when the family synod was held in Rome in 2015, when the Church’s (mainly European) libera…
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…on was transmitted to their insurers by some administrative means, be it a phone call, email or letter. So after years of fighting the mandate, and accusing women’s health advocates and public health official of not understanding why it was a violation of their faith for their insurer to provide birth control that they neither arranged nor paid for, Notre Dame basically turned around and said “never mind.” What happened to cause this astounding tu…
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…ow what happened to Walter Scott is because a bystander filmed it with his phone. In making his plea, Pinckney invoked the biblical story of Doubting Thomas, the one of Jesus’s disciples who would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw him with his own eyes and touched his wounds with his own hands. “It was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe,’” Pinckney said of Thomas. Some people, said Pinckney, are like Thomas…
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…all time and space? When the Cubit recently reached out to Dr. Reiss for a phone interview, though, his answers were surprising. We discussed his methodology, potential applications of his theory to secularism, and Reiss’s own spirituality as a scientist. How does your theory differ from those of past authors that posit just one or two motivations for religion? Ours is based on scientific research, so we ask people what motivates them. At this poi…
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