Religion Dispatches
…t of Martin Luther King’s assassination fielded celebratory calls as a telephone operator in Memphis, Tennessee, telephoned us to awake my four-year-old twins from their sleep. Through her sniffles and giggles, this loving grandmother and now proud American citizen, kept repeating, “you tell those babies Obama did it! Obama did it! Wake them up and let them know that “O’RockoBama” [my son’s pronunciation] really did win tonight!” And I also receiv…
Read More
…ss doesn’t add up to cultural relevance. The technology may have changed, but authority over the spiritual message remains in the hands of the adult ministers who shape it. Such approaches to the integration of digital media with religious practice fail to grasp the interactive nature of new digital media, which invites both vertical participation between traditionally authoritative sources (like clergy) and laypeople of all ages and horizontal pa…
Read More…ans and 50 percent of the general population identified as “pro-life”; the number of Americans who identified as “pro-choice” hit a record low. But respondents’ opinions on policy issues around abortion had not drastically changed from previous years. Just over half of Americans think abortion should be “legal under certain” circumstances, only 2 percent more people than last year. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans (compared to 27 percent in 2011…
Read More
…ious, including in many of the remaining warehouses, where real concern about the future of those spaces is palpable. At the fire site, chaplains have carried flowers and photographs through the fencing to create a makeshift shrine, because the building is still sealed off from the public. At the Lake Merritt vigil this past Monday, attendants were asked not to bring candles out of respect for those who had died in flames. Instead, they brought gl…
Read More…ge societal practices. Weren’t they all swarthy, bearded males featured shouting furiously about America on the cover of Newsweek? And then there was the professor. She was so filled with outrage over oppressive practices that limited women’s choices that she wanted the United States to engage in a political war with those countries to change what they did. So little did she know about the local contexts, and so little credit did she give them, th…
Read More
…tion, conspiracy, and breach of contract. One of the truly weird things about out this case was that in the Dennis’ lawsuit, they felt the need to stress that they aren’t anti-religious—as if somehow their objection of a cross branded on their kid might be perceived that way. “We are religious people,” they said in a statement after they filed suit in June. “But we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This wa…
Read More
…s of Jesus as a moral teacher. So he went through copies of the Bible and cut out with a penknife everything that had to do with Jesus’s life and teachings as opposed to the mystical and supernatural. In Jefferson’s Bible, there is no water into wine, no healing the sick, no raising Lazarus from the dead. Jefferson thought that Paul and every other interpreter really missed the point with Jesus. He felt that the authors of the Christian tradition,…
Read More
…insincerely, toward a foregone conclusion, or we fail to act upon our resolution. But not always. Sometimes we consciously choose to do something and we do it. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but it often does. Moreover, free will must exist, if some creatures have more of it than others. My teenage daughter and son have more free will—more choices to consider and select from—than they did when they were infants. They also have m…
Read More
…ved on some level—that elites have rigged the system in their own favor, shutting out everyone else, trapping them in debt, and that innocents suffer as a result. The media divide people to distract from this elite control, while the rich get richer and everyone else is held back. By affirming these generalized and unfalsifiable beliefs, QAnon offers a better world, a chance to fight for righteousness and freedom. It does so by offering easy and c…
Read More
…tures had perched. All this might imply that the Hopkinsville incident was utterly novel—but it wasn’t. Extraterrestrial encounters were common fare in the media of the early Cold War. What is interesting about Hopkinsville is not that it was unique, but the ways Americans in general, and the residents of Hopkinsville in particular, made the incident an expression of their anxieties. The eight years between Billy Ray Taylor’s sprint back to the Su…
Read More