Religion Dispatches
…“Biblical Money Code” appears as a fake news article, or “advertorial,” on Newsmax, the semi-fake news website. Hyman in fact seems to work for the website, although his actual role is unclear—a recent bio says that he is part of its “Financial Brain Trust.” “A wise man looks well into a matter,” Proverbs, and Hyman, reminds us. While I wouldn’t make any claims to wisdom, I will say that I have looked into it and conclude that it would be foolish…
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…ene, as the Egyptian authorities did in 2007 when they banned The Da Vinci Code. The Coptic community—which accounts for roughly 10 percent of the nation’s 80 million citizens—had raised alarm and demanded that both the book and movie be banned. Now, three years on, Zeidan’s bestselling novel is is prompting angry demands from that same community. In early May a group of Coptic lawyers demanded that the government imprison the author for five year…
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…ke away that free will, except for those who have the capacity to hack the code and reprogram the car. We normally think of robots as almost pure code, yet the scene last week when Graystone orders the Zoebot to rip off her arm raises some interesting stakes in this. It seems to me that people may be treating the Cylons differently depending on what mix of code and law they believe governs their behavior. And of course, those of you who study reli…
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…ong” for May and the Conservative Party to be aligning themselves with and promoting “an organization that promotes hatred, homophobia and misogyny born of religious fundamentalism and masquerading as religious freedom.” The UK’s general election will be held on June 9. Poland: Warsaw Pride parade draws crowd in spite of opposition from church, gov’t, nationalists A crowd estimated by organizers at 50,000 people and by police at 13,000 marched in…
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…was conference participants’ group travel to tour two forts, at Elmina and Cape Coast, where many captured Africans last were held before being taken into “New World” enslavement. Tour of the forts, castles atop dungeons of enslavement, gave context to the differing social and geographical worlds we exist in. They also encouraged conferees to hear each other’s stories, and make space to begin speaking honestly about diverse meanings and experience…
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…editor-in-chief. Horowitz specifically situates Neville—and himself—in the New Thought movement. When I told him that Neville’s book had seemed kind of fascist to me, he said that “New Thought philosophy has always faced that ethical dilemma. If you take it as a given that the mind can shape reality, what are the implications of that?” And further, “I don’t think New Thought has ever properly come to terms with the ethical implications of what it…
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…the very nature of the culture shaped by digital social media allows that users will come up with new, creative, and, in the case of an app like Confession, wholly heterodox ways of using it. In the end, developers never really own the applications they create. They are not selling passive use. They are sharing access to new ways of engaging longstanding traditions that can be further adapted through wider use. These apps, then, are malleable cul…
Read More…economic woes plaguing the state and the country if elected president,” OneNewsNow, a news service sponsored by the American Family Association, recently reported. Matthew 25 Network founder Mara Vanderslice “says her group is hoping to run its latest pro-Obama ad in Cleveland, Youngstown, Cincinnati, and Columbus, as well as in smaller locales such as Findlay and Mount Vernon. Salem Radio affiliate WFHM 95.5 ‘The Fish’ in Cleveland is already run…
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…ment approved the Principles of the Islamic Bylaw and the Islamic criminal code, which created new discriminatory offenses that do not exist in the Indonesian national criminal code. The bylaws extend Sharia to non-Muslims and criminalize consensual same-sex sexual acts as well as all zina (sexual relations outside of marriage). The criminal code permits as punishment up to 100 lashes and up to 100 months in prison for consensual same-sex sexual a…
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…ll. Here are the old hallmarks of action-adventure culture, attuned to the new landscape of wounds. All that’s left is to see whether the story will continue to sate moviegoers’ hunger. ____________ Note: Right before beginning this piece, I drove by Ryan Weldon on a highway outside of Bangs, Tex.. Weldon had an enormous American flag strapped to his back, and he was wearing a sign that said he was walking 5,000 miles in order to raise awareness a…
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