Religion Dispatches
…that girls in the Middle East were married off at early ages, with barely any education at all. The professor went a step beyond outrage. She called upon the international and American community—via her undergraduates, if you please—to save Muslim women in the Middle East. America, she entreated, should penalize Middle Eastern nations. Any country that disadvantaged women to the extent that they could not easily pursue careers, and where they were…
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…tive job at focusing the debate on the Bible, rather than the brand. For many in the community, not only do they oppose the concept of separation of church, they’re not even aware of it. Lori Miller, a fellow teacher in the middle school, testified at the administrative hearing in March on Freshwater’s behalf. Hoppe wrote the following account of her testimony: Asked if she had encouraged students at school to embrace Christianity before the Fresh…
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…of those great Enlightenment polymaths. He saw himself as equipped to do anything, any challenge, whether it was archaeology or politics or editing the Gospels. Except freeing the slaves. He wasn’t up for that challenge. That’s something I realized only later, that he is excused as a man of his time when we talk of the ownership and enslavement of men, women, and children. And yet he thought of himself as ahead of his time. He was in fact impriso…
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…rial soul? Science has discovered nothing that contradicts free will. To deny free will’s existence is to deny that our conscious, psychological deliberations—Should I ask my girlfriend to marry me? Should I major in engineering or art?—influence our actions. Such a conclusion flies in the face of common sense. Of course, sometimes we deliberate insincerely, toward a foregone conclusion, or we fail to act upon our resolution. But not always. Somet…
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…urnalist, Cook wrote an article about families affected by QAnon and got many more emails in response, which became the genesis of this book. It’s based on “hundreds of hours” of interviews in person, by phone, and online over three years. The pacing is fine, and by chapter 10 it becomes truly heartbreaking. Reading about people ruining their lives and the lives of their loved ones, over and again, is not a light read. In that sense it resembles a…
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…n fired shots at the creatures at least four times but never seemed to do any damage. At eleven o’clock, the farmhouse residents’ nerves were frayed. They piled into two cars and fled to Hopkinsville for help. By the end of the week Madisonville Road, which ran next to the Sutton property, was jammed with cars parked haphazardly and pedestrians picking their way along the drainage ditches. The local police, state police, and reporters from Kentuck…
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…t about human sacrifice,” and another insists that, “Satan never murdered anyone.” An essay on the afterlife contains no mention of other galaxies but does describe hell as a “safe place.” Satanists, it claims, will be escorted to hell by protector demons and treated as “VIPs.” This may have been an appealing idea to Dobson, who claims he attempted suicide to escape demons that were tormenting him nightly. However, “Joy of Satan” discourages suici…
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…e case that we also no longer inhabit his mental world in such a way that anything he might have to say about credit or debt makes any sense. I owe, therefore I am. That has been our new reality for some time. The question is: how did this happen and who, if anyone, is to blame? I am very much afraid that our masters, both corporate and civic, may be about to put all of us now-sorrowing borrowers through a public shaming to the point that we will…
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…fight. If someone had pressed into his fingers at that pivotal moment the phone number for The Trevor Project, he might reach out and hear a voice of reassurance, a voice that gave him hope for life by, in part, repudiating the so-called biblical teaching that who he is amounts to an offense against God. If he’d had a sense of belonging to a community that embraced him for who he is, maybe his hope wouldn’t be so fully shattered. But while other…
Read More…the same way it does regarding slavery, or viewing women as property, or any number of things that our culture no longer affirms or accepts. My perspective can best be summarized in a quote from my theological hero, John Caputo: “My own view is that the outcome of a careful debate about these matters would be to show that there simply are no arguments to show that homosexual love is of itself anything else than love, and that therefore, since the…
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