Religion Dispatches
…g you. Take someone along. Preferably your worst enemy. Spy is rated (R) for treasonous liberal revisionism. Good guys only kill bad guys, but bad guys mostly only kill bad guys, which makes it hard to know who’s with us and who’s against us….
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…from the harsher realities of their time. They kept playing through the ugly parts of the ’70s and the ugly parts of the ’80s, and it took the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995 to get them to finally stop. Which, as their upcoming “final” final shows in Chicago this weekend demonstrate, they really never did. What my friend Steve revealed for me that afternoon as we listened to “Ripple” in his office, was that you don’t have to pack up your life and…
Read More…Heer calls “aggrieved privilege” (not populism), Palin wrapped it in overtly religious gestures. Her gestures, particularly her verbal ones, bore all the hallmarks of modern televangelism: an insistence on biblical inerrancy paired with a claim that the speaker can receive new revelations, directly from God, about one’s social, economic, and political prospects. It’s a perfect model for Trump: reinterpreting the Bible to claim God picked you out…
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…him) and losers (McCain, Perry, etc); a world of put up or shut up (literally).” “And what does Trump get for speaking out so boldly without holding back?” Brody asks. “Public ridicule.” Evangelicals, Brody contends, can commiserate with poor Donald Trump: Now, think of conservative evangelicals. In their quest to champion biblical values, their mindset is much the same. It is a world of absolutes. They believe the Bible to be the inerrant word of…
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…rly at all. We’re more likely to be—gasp!—Democrats, or Republicans. Actually, mostly Democrats. (See also: Ben Carson.) So why do some people keep confusing these very different categories? And assuming American Muslims are all potentially ISIS fighters? “Many of the people and politicians who make sweeping generalizations about Islamists have never actually had a proper conversation with a real-life Islamist. We don’t have to like Islamists, but…
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…owth,” we also learn that this lifelong quest has had a happy outcome, namely an “increased Adjusted EBITDA from $11.2 million in 2012 to $35.7 million in 2014, representing a CAGR of 78% and an Adjusted EBITDA Margin of 32% in 2014.” Is SoulCycle in “the business of changing lives” or is it in the business of producing the “highly attractive financial profile and unit economic returns” and “strong Free Cash Flows” that investors crave? After 148…
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…imperative of anti-discrimination and anti-marginalization pervades strongly and will likely impact national-level decision-making. “For all human rights groups engaged in the process, it’s been really important to emphasize the issues of discrimination and exclusion, and remind the governments drafting the text that even if they don’t mention all groups as we want, they still have to agree to the commitment that discrimination goes across all li…
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…robot-human interaction, and an adorable one? These questions aren’t strictly academic. From the Microsoft paperclip to Siri, millions of people interact daily with human-mimicking computer programs. Earlier this summer, Aldebaran, a French robotics manufacturer (I’ve written about them before) released Pepper, a sophisticated “emotional robot” with a “focus on affection,” that costs just a bit more than a MacBook Pro. Microsoft has a creepy new c…
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…regular speaker at explicitly Christian Reconstructionist conferences. His reasoning often invokes the notion of sphere sovereignty. What’s more, he invokes an even more fundamental aspect of Christian Reconstruction: the view that there are ultimately only two sources of authority and all knowledge is dependent on the acceptance of one or the other with neutrality between the two being impossible. They call this presuppositionalism and it is wha…
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…th yes.” “Oh, that’s precious. Wait’ll I tell the choir. [Delete]” Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter what the intentions were. Sure, if it were one email and one church, you might ask whether it was an accident. If it turned out that the church, like, didn’t have internet access for the duration of the study because the whole town was overrun by zombies, and they couldn’t get word out because there was a quarantine, OK, fine. But this i…
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