Religion Dispatches
…and black folks who spoke funny languages were sometimes engaged in a life-and-death struggle to change 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…
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…nt. The Dennises said the burn, which in photos [above, right] show an 8-by-4-inch mark on their son’s forearm, raised blisters, kept their son awake that night, and lasted for several weeks. At first glance, they saw the mark as a religious emblem. But their first concern was less about religion and more about what they considered to be a case of a teacher injuring their son. In response, the Dennises filed a federal lawsuit against Freshwater an…
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…tion recasts it in its own image. Your book takes us through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of the Jefferson Bible as an historical object. What’s your favorite part? I’m drawn to Cyrus Adler. Starting in the late nineteenth century, he was a curator of the National Museum, a precursor to the Smithsonian. He had a job like I do, and he stumbled into it like I did, and he built upon the idea of religion as an important part of the Am…
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…om for free will.” He adds, “Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.” Researchers have certainly raised intriguing questions about the link between our choices and actions. Harris cites experiments by the physiologist Benjamin Libet, in which subjects pushed a button whenever they chose while noting the time of their decision as displayed on a clock. The subjects took 0.2 seconds on average to p…
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…find a way back to each other, and to themselves.” And the subjects’ highly-idealized pre-QAnon lives make the reader feel as though they’re being whacked over the head with the message that they’re just like you! They were living the American dream! Ultimately, Cook gives the impression that, when bad things happen that make you vulnerable, and misinformation fills that void, oops, anyone could end up in QAnon. This formula largely ignores the pr…
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…ception. While Hopkinsville’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…
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…tanic organizations. Its website is rife with comments that are openly anti-Semitic and anti-Christian—but it does not advocate murder. One essay explains that Satanism “is not 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…
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…precepts for wholesome living? May I suggest that apart from finding beady-eyed, thrift-obsessed old Franklin somewhat repulsive today, it is also the 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…
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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…been picked up by Gawker and gone viral. Like, over-a-million-views, posted-by-George-(Sulu)-Takei viral. So he had quite a weekend, in other words. Here’s what he had to say about the experience. SMB: So did anything interesting happen to you over the weekend? 🙂 Phil Snider: Can’t think of anything. 😉 More seriously, why don’t you give us a little bit of the background on your August speech to the City Council? What was the resolution, and how di…
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