Religion Dispatches
…ch. We are the Church.” While a single example, this statement reminds us, today, on World AIDS Day 2008, that throughout its history, AIDS/HIV has been entangled with religion—for good and ill. As we move into the second quarter century of the pandemic, this entanglement continues. Twenty-first century religion has been shaped by and has shaped the AIDS/HIV crisis; they continue to shape one another. Today, we often hear about this entanglement i…
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…ve, regardless of what it is. One way to describe what’s happening is that today there is a surplus of masculine purpose. Purposive energy exceeds the capacity to imagine what good purposes to put it to. This might help explain how men today might be drawn to causes that promise opportunities to express purpose. That is what ISIS offers. It is what vigilante occupation of government property offers. It is what “stand your ground” laws offer. It is…
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…rge reproduction of the front page of the Palestine Post (the precursor of today’s Jerusalem Post) of May 14, 1948, which reads: “State of Israel Declared.” When Jerry Falwell died in May of 2007, he was eulogized by leaders of the American Jewish community as “a dear great friend of Israel.” Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson made the case for Israel so consistently and unequivocally that today, among the conservative ev…
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…ealed: What could top such a list? Since we’re on the subject of disasters today, we might have noted how, amid the response to Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s FEMA hyped Robertson’s philanthropic arm, Operation Blessing. This organization is small and unorthodox at best, and has been accused of various irregularities. Yet early in the crisis it appeared on a FEMA list of just three places to donate, alongside the Red Cross. If we compare thes…
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…edieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative…
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…in order to “join the club.” “Therefore,” Kirill says, “what is happening today in the sphere of international relations has not only political significance.” Indeed, he says, it is of “metaphysical significance.” And here is where the cowardice comes in. First, Kirill reiterates and defends the Russian justification: Who is attacking Ukraine today, where the suppression and extermination of people in the Donbass has been going on for eight years…
Read More…Nazis in concentration camps during World War II,” an apparent prelude to today’s discourse.) Pierce notes that Deal Hudson, who helped the George W. Bush presidential campaign with outreach to Catholics, wrote a “prescient” 1995 piece in his magazine Crisis, “about a possible alliance between evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics.” Deal wasn’t the first, of course; Francis Schaeffer famously called for co-belligerence as well, and t…
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…is the complete insulation from the consequences of bad policy enjoyed by today’s jeunesse doree. Not only do they not have to go to the burning deserts of Iraq or to the chilly forbidding heights of Afghanistan: they don’t even have to know anything about the lives of those who are going. The idea that they might experience any Fallows-like guilt or have any second thoughts about their degree of insulation is simply not an issue today. This extr…
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…lity, but a dive into progressive dreams about what the world ought to be. Today’s media marketplace was constructed on a scaffold of adventures, role-played in the depths of the night, fueled by pizza, soda, and dreams. Today’s videogames are the highest grossing entertainment medium in the world, and they are the direct descendants of D&D. These digital worlds populated by monsters and magic were made possible by The Monster Manual. That volume,…
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…ege, and have written for mainstream Christian magazines like Christianity Today and Relevant. How would you describe your current relationship with evangelical Christianity, and how have these experiences living and working with refugees shaped that relationship? In some ways evangelicalism is just is a part of me, and I am comfortable using the insider language and in certain ways find it comforting to be around people who understand me in that…
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