Religion Dispatches
…ing will begin: Did the nomination of the Alaska governor help or hurt the ticket? Did playing solely to the base—religious conservatives in particular—limited the ticket’s appeal? Does the Party have to become more mainstream, more inclusive, and more tolerant? Is Palin to be the Party’s savior? Or, have the American people learned more than enough about some of the less-than-ethical ways she goes about her business? Everyone will have an opinion…
Read More
…sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art made in any time…
Read More
…them. That’s what severed the relationship. Academic Quality A surprising number of courses asked little more of students than to memorize Bible verses or learn basic details of biblical stories so that they could fill in the blanks on tests. Some made very questionable choices about the use of classroom time, such as the course that spent two days watching “the historic documentary Ancient Aliens,” which presents “a new interpretation of angelic…
Read More…es ECI’s leadership – knows this to be the case. Which makes ECI’s video a cheap lie — yet another in a long litany of desperate efforts by the far right to convert the largely liberal American Jewish community to neo-conservatism, hawkish policies on Israel, and the belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” is a Muslim. That said, there actually are two interesting forms of antisemitism going on here. First is the antisemitism of ECI itself. To tug at…
Read More
…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …
Read More
…the flag that wants them destroyed They saw their names listed in the telephone directory of destruction They were trained to turn the other cheek by newspapers that misspelled, mispronounced and misunderstood their names and celebrated when death came and stole their final laundry ticket” -excerpt from “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri Then the lights went out and the stage lit up, and 60,000 white people finally started paying attention….
Read More
…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
Read More
…world, even as it challenges the notions of it. St. Vincent (a.k.a. Annie Clark) kicked off her career in a similar fashion, with the cheekily titled, “Jesus Saves, I Spend,” which deceptively covers a meditation on her aching devotion to a lover: “Come my love the stage is waiting/Be the one to save my saving grace/While Jesus is saving I’m spending all my grace/On rosy-red pallor of lights on center stage.” On 2014’s “I Prefer Your Love To Jesu…
Read More
…lism, such metaphorical contortions are no longer sustainable. Writer Fred Clark makes this point explicitly in his short, but incredibly trenchant contribution to the collection. For too long, Clark points out, scholars like Marsden, Noll, Bebbington, and others have written about evangelicalism and thought that their work described “someone who likes Billy Graham.” In reality, their portrayal of evangelicalism as intellectual and orthodox more a…
Read More
…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…
Read More